Tempo Head of Product: From First Line of Code to Mainnet in 7 Months

Sy Taylor  0:00  

Simon, 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 for today, author at FinTech, brainford and head of market dev over a tempo and joining me, as always, is the fantastic Kai Sheffield, head of crypto at visa. How the heck are you, sir? Been a

Cuy Sheffield  0:27  

fun week, tired, a lot going on, but we've got some great things to

Sy Taylor  0:32  

talk through today. Indeed, we've got some great guests as well. Making a return is Raj Parekh, who's the head of stable coins and payments at monad. How you doing? Raj?

Raj Parekh  0:40  

Doing? Fantastic. Just another slow week in the stable Coin World.

Sy Taylor  0:44  

It is slow week indeed. And making a debut is the one and only. Liam freaking horn, ladies and gentlemen, product tempo, the man behind the OP stack, legend in the industry, and my colleague, how you doing?

Liam Horne  0:55  

Man, I'm great. I'm excited to be here. I've been listening to the podcast for quite a while, so it's really cool to be here.

Sy Taylor  1:01  

Yeah, low key stalking the pod to gem up on trod fire. I appreciate you for that. Before we jump into the good stuff, I got to remind viewers and listeners that views and contributions of our guests today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. And please don't take anything we say is tax, legal or financial advice. And with that, let's get to the first story. And well, we had some news this week. First was the launch of the machine payments protocol, introduced by and CO developed by stripe and tempo, with a fairly major assist from the folks over at visa. So the machine payments protocol is a new internet native protocol for agents to buy access to APIs and resources or other agents directly. So vibe coders can use MPP to access large language models or pay for tokens. But what makes this a little bit different to x 402, or some of the other things out there is it's truly payment method agnostic. So today, it supports stable coins on tempo, it supports the Lightning Network, and it supports credit or debit cards via stripe or via a broader spec that visa has introduced. And it's designed to scale into the millions or billions of transactions per second, and doesn't require an intermediary in its peer to peer. So lots to unpack here, but Liam, I'm going to start with you. Take me inside the development of MPP, and kind of your experience using it as somebody who's developing a blockchain, doing quite a lot of engineering work yourself, like, why do we need MPP and how can I use it today?

Speaker 2  2:36  

Yeah, so we launched machine payments protocol. The basic idea behind it is there's clearly going to be a lot of demand by agents to do payments for commerce use cases, or micro payments, or all the different types of things that we've been talking about. But there's not really a good, low level primitive that's payment rail agnostic that's out there right now. It's either you're doing something that maybe is very oriented towards cards, or you have something that's very oriented towards stable towards stable coins, and there's sort of not quite at the level of, say, an internet standard in the way that people might be familiar with with those. So what we did is we looked at the 402 payment required code that people might be familiar with on the internet, and said, Okay, what would be truly the most general, neutral, abstract implementation of a sort of payment method agnostic protocol that would implement that that would work for either cards, it could work for a payment processor like Stripe. It could work using stable coins. It could work using any blockchain and any any means. And we tried to just focus on that so the actual underlying details of it are relatively simple, but to get it exactly right, so that it could fit within any of these sort of forms just required a lot of precision. So it's exciting to be able to work with stripe on that. They obviously have lots of years of experience building payments and also taking a lot of lessons learned from things like x 402, that's begun some of the micro payment sort of interactions. We just assigned a protocol that we think is going to be very long, lasting and acceptable by even like bodies like the IETF that design these internet standards as something that can be relatively neutral and adopted by the industry.

Sy Taylor  4:13  

Kai, you've been vibe coding a storm lately. There's folks like parallel, there's browser based. There's a bunch of things that you end up using when you're stuck in the command line. And I know Visa has played a pretty big role here. Do you want to talk about your perspective on MPP and the role it's going to play?

Cuy Sheffield  4:31  

Sure, so so many thoughts. First, shout out to you all the tempo team. You guys cooked on this like this is very, very cool. I think it's a big step for the entire industry. Other thought is, Simon, how long have we been hosting podcasts together? Like, at least a few years, and we've never actually really gotten to work on anything together. It's like we've been yapping. We've just been like talking, but we've never actually, like, been able to partner and work on something. And so appreciate the opportunity to partner and collaborate, and it was super fun. And. And then I think, like, a little bit of the backstory here is, you reached out what maybe, like a month ago. Time is a blur. You shared the MPP spec. We looked at it. We're like, this is this is really elegant. It's really well designed. And we think it's a good solution for right now, if you want to enable your agent to spend a lot of the way that agentic Commerce has functioned has been going through the browser and having the agent, you know, you're kind of throwing that out there in, like, human land, trying to, like, navigate and click through buttons and, like, find a checkout. It's just really hard when, if you really want this, like, machine payments, like, you need basically a headless checkout. You need the spec, you know, for an agent to communicate with the merchant say what it wants to buy. The merchant provides the price the agent can then pay and so and I think we've seen X 402, and other protocols, and we're excited about them as well, and we've been working closely on a number of things there, but we thought it was a really well designed protocol, and then it really resonated with us that our belief is the only way agentic commerce is going to scale is if it's payment method agnostic, if it's payment network agnostic, if it's PSP agnostic, if it's vault prior, agnostic, like this is the only way like this is it is too big of a market to say the winning solution is going to be one chain, one company like it just it's not going to work. So that was our approach, is to say that principle is important. And it seemed like we shared that vision and that principle. And so we got to work and shout out to we had multiple engineers in the office over the weekend. We were just like, crank it up. Like, how do we take this spec and adapt it so that it can work for any card network, any PSP, any vault provider. So we put out the spec, we wrote the SDK, and then what I shared yesterday is we built a working end to end experience that you can go through and that I'm using today, along with other visa employees. That's called visa CLI, that is making live transactions over MPP card, and so I've been in the command line, in cloud code with one of my personal Visa cards. I've been buying image generation, I've been generating songs. I've just been like, cooking up a storm, paying on my card. And it works today, so it's still incredibly early. There's a lot of work to do. Yeah, this is just a few visa employees that are testing it, but we're really excited over the coming weeks to one help enable the ecosystem, talking to many PSPs, many merchants, many wallets, helping them figure out how to use MPP card and then ultimately open up visa CLI to friends and family and others over time. And I think that when we look back, this could end up becoming, I've said for a while, 2026 is a turning point year for objective commerce, but I think this week, particularly with tempo, with stripe, with many others, it's just it's another turning point to say there are now more protocols, more standards, more tools, more infrastructure, and you can have the entire ecosystem come in and adopt and build, and we're really excited

Sy Taylor  8:04  

to see that, Raj, I want to bring you on this as an outside in perspective, right? Like the agentic commerce meta has been there for a while, but like, if you speak to AI devs like Peter Steinberg hates crypto because of all the meme coin stuff, what's your perspective on whether AI devs are going to actually embrace something like this, and what was it going to take? I feel like I've already

Raj Parekh  8:26  

seen it. I mean, in SF here, you know, I've attended X 402, meetups. We launched a hackathon itself. And when you're actually going to some of these meetups and these hackathons, you actually don't see crypto devs. You actually see a lot of AI web, two devs that are actually playing with this technology. And I think for the first time, you're starting to see a lot of to see a lot of these devs see that have that eye opening moment where they can say, Oh, wait, this is actually digital, native money that actually moves, and I can interact with it using the CLI or using Cloud code. And I think that's a really powerful opportunity, like we have our monad MPP extension that's about to get shipped fairly soon as well. And so I think it's overall like, I haven't seen AI devs fear this at all because it's crypto. I think they have actually embraced it because of what they can do with it too.

Sy Taylor  9:10  

I think about Liam, could you just talk to some of the friction of like having to go subscribe to a new API, and some of the things developers at the hackathon you're sitting in right now. Are doing that maybe they weren't doing before? Yeah.

Speaker 2  9:25  

I mean, it's very tactical, like, if you, if you think about it, if you're going to go tell your agent, hey, I want to go buy a domain name, or I want to generate some sort of, like an image or something that requires some external service, if your agent comes back to you and says, that's great, but you need to now click on this link to open up this website, and then you need to, like, paste in a bunch of details, or you need to create an account, sign up with Google, you know, copy and paste this API code into a doc end file. It's like, just, it's just annoying. And the whole idea of agentic kind of workflows is that it should just work. You should just talk to the agent. And never leave the agent flow. And so if we're going to create that sort of a product, just broadly speaking, as we're building out agents, you just can't have that blocker in the workflow. So the hope, and what we're trying to do by getting people to build MPP services is that people can implement this. And so the agent will simply, as it's running, say, Oh, this particular service you need to buy a domain name or to download a font or to do this particular deep research type task, it accepts a payment, and so the agent will say, Do you want to just pay it in this known way, whether with a card or with a stable coin? And you can just simply tell your agent to pay with certain permissions and certain policies, and it gets past the hurdle of having to open a browser or to kind of get blocked in your workflow. Our hope right now with the hackathon, and like you mentioned, I'm literally at a hackathon with 100 people are out outside the door that I'm in right now, the hope is that we're going to get tons of these services built out for like, hundreds or 1000s of different use cases in the internet. And the vast majority of use cases that people use agents for will have a kind of MTP enabled endpoint to hit, so that way you just never have to leave your coding agent or your AI harness, whatever it is.

Cuy Sheffield  11:08  

So Simon, I'm not sure if you've seen this or felt this as a response to the announcement. Like one of the really interesting things to me has been how different the reactions are where vibe coders, who use Cloud code that are, like, particularly daily active users of cloud code. We we posted out a link, and we didn't know what people think. Really, here's visa CLI, like, check it out. Like, it's experimental thing. Like we're putting together what feedback. And people are like, yes. Like, thank you. Like, I need this. I hate leaving the command line and so this idea of command line commerce, there's a segment of customer, they're like, this is solving one of the biggest pains. And I feel this myself as a customer. I hate when I have to leave the command line. I hate getting API keys. I want to kill the API key. And so that resonates a ton. If you talk to someone who hasn't used Claude code, or has it been a command line they're like, What? Why it's like? So it's like, this huge, huge difference. And so what I've been trying to do is to say, Okay, let me help you get set up on Cloud code. Let's sit down. Let me, like, show you how this works. And then, so there is this, like, big difference between if you're in the trenches, in the ecosystem, and you felt the problem and how obvious it is, the MPP, MPP card, like, all the things that we're building is solving the problem. If you're outside the trenches, you're just like, well, I have a subscription to Google right now, and I could generate whatever image I want. Like, that's great. But what are you generating those images for? And what do you want to do with it? If you're in the command line, not only can you generate an image as part of a workflow, you can then design a website to display and organize those images however you want. Like you can't do that in your normal nano banana Gemini app is like, in 15 seconds, generate 100 images and then design a gallery to display them in. And so it's like these primitives have existed of image generation, music generation, all these but when they're all in different places under different subscriptions, like they're kind of a toy that you show off as at a party, when you have a command line that you could build any product or service, and then you can bring all those primitives in and just pay for them in one place. That's how this goes from like a toy to a platform that you can enable really powerful apps and experiences. But I'm not sure if you've seen

Sy Taylor  13:32  

something similar, 100% I come back to this point of you know, when the collisons were going around for funding, they would tell everybody that was going to invest in them that their customer doesn't exist yet. And VCs were like, Well, that makes you not very investable. But of course, their customer was the developer, and the developer had too much friction. They needed to get to being able to accept payments really, really quickly. And what stripe did was compress that time. There's a bunch of friction if you are sitting in the command line building applications today that if you're not you just don't know exists. And what's really blown my mind has been the amount of people who say, You know what, I would never have gone to grok and paid for the API just to get access to the Twitter data. But actually, because I can do it in a micro payment, it's super useful, and I would never have gone and used this one random voice generation thing, even though I probably had access to it through open router, but because I found it was cheaper, and with MPP, I could just pay for it and I didn't need a new subscription, I could kind of get it done. People are discovering new services, and it's creating competition in who those services are, and I think that's really, really fascinating. Liam, there's another thing that's really cool about MPP that I want you to talk about, which is the idea of sessions. Do you want to explain what a session is and how that works?

Speaker 2  14:52  

Yeah, this is something that's also kind of very near and dear to my heart, because for very many years, I've been in the blockchain industry trying to work. Work on scalable blockchain payments. Literally, since 2017 we were whiteboarding out ideas of how to do scalable blockchain payments. And a lot of these ideas that we're doing with tempo have this kind of same shape of back then, we knew this would eventually matter, but it just like, no one ever used it, no one ever cared about it, until now, basically, where we're bringing all these ideas back and the idea of sessions, it's relatively simple. It's kind of like a tab at a bar where you know that you're going to interact with some particular counterparty for for the seeable future, for some session that you can foresee. And so you kind of put almost down some amount of funds. You don't give them the funds, but you kind of create a tab with them by saying, you lock up, say, $5 because you anticipate spending up to $5 with them over the next hour. And over the course of the next hour, you then make small incremental payments that kind of draw down from the $5 and once you're done with the session, you then claim back the $5 so the reason why that's relevant is that in blockchain terms, instead of doing say, hundreds of payments of like a cent each, you can do one payment, or rather one locking of those funds, which is an on chain transaction, and then hundreds of micro payments, each of which are pretty much instant and completely free. So from the point of view of someone trying to make payments, you start doing literally hundreds of payments a minute, just on a peer to peer basis within a session. And this is we used to be called payment channels back in the day and blockchain lore, it's just a very simple concept for I would call maybe agentic payments now. So we're baking this into MPP. And the basic use case, I think, is the most obvious one, perhaps, is you're literally querying an LLM, and you wanted to give you some output, and maybe you pay on a per token basis. So every individual token might be like 1/10 of a cent or something like that, and you want to get some output, and you simply put down $5 at the beginning. And as the LLM produces tokens, you just pay on a per token basis, and then once you're done, you close it out. So yeah, basically it's a very simple primitive to enable micro payments that we've baked into MPP, and similarly, with tempo, we're going to bake into tempo.

Sy Taylor  17:04  

I think that's fascinating, because tokens move a lot faster than even the fastest payment system in the world. There's something like 4 million emails per second on the internet, never mind API calls. If you've ever looked how fast tokens stream like if you wanted to be able to be able to pay per token, you need something faster than settlement. You need this other layer. So I think it's, it's interesting to kind of build that. My final reflection on this story is, I think for a long time, people have been trying to put the checkout inside the LLM, and they've been trying to build towards that the home. But actually, is the future of commerce that agents go do this stuff for you. And if the agent is doing the stuff, what do they need? A checkout for the checkout is built for a human. What the agents want is something really, really clean. Agents like markdown, they like CLIs, and they like very simple internet native protocols. And so maybe when agents buy things for you, and you know extension of you, yes, we need to think about authentication, and we need to make sure that that payment method is accepted, but it should just work. And you don't need, like, a checkout on a web page. You just need something really clean and really simple. So I'm sure we're going to hear a lot more about MPP in the near future. Go to MPP dot dev if you want to have a play. There's a little demo on the homepage where you can generate some stuff with probably some services you've never used, and you can go payment, auth.org, to check out the specs directly. But we have to talk about the next story this week, we kind of buried the lead here. The tempo main net launched Liam. I think this was something like seven months from first line of code to main net. So my hat's off to you having seen this from the inside. Holy moly. What a team and what you guys have cooked. I hope you take a round of applause for that like incredible. So of course, incubated by stripe and paradigm, with support from over 50 design partners, including beta, MasterCard, DoorDash, Nubank, revolucana, Shopify and the list goes on, we're also supported by ecosystem partners like bvnk, fireblocks, bridge, turnkey privy, we have an open ecosystem, and we've innovated a bunch of novel features based on those design partner bits of feedback. So Liam, couple of things I want to come to on this, which is like first seven months from first line of code to main net. How are you alive and breathing? And second, walk me through some of the key features and why you think they're important. Absolutely.

Speaker 2  19:31  

Yeah, Temple, main net. Even though it's seven months from the kind of first line of code to main net, I would say in reality, it's been like a again, it's almost like a decade long journey, because so much of the underpinnings of tempo have been kind of critical infrastructure already in the blockchain industry for many, many years. For instance, the underlying client that tempo is built on is called ref and Reth is actually the most performant client already for Ethereum maintenance, one of the most used clients, the execution clients on Ethereum. It's. Also the client that based blockchain uses. There's been tons of work on that over many, many years by George Yost, who's the CTO at tempo, and the team that he's built up there. And I've also gotten the opportunity to work really closely with it, because even with optimism, which I built previously, we also got to build out a ref client. So the underlying infrastructure has been very battle tested for many, many years, and it's been exciting for us to kind of take that and extend on top of it, the features that make stable coin payments very, very well suited on tempo. So yeah, even though it's kind of been relatively fast, I feel extremely confident in the underlying infrastructure because of how battle tested it is. And the other thing I would add is even the infrastructure on top of the underlying blockchain is also very, very battle tested. So the developer tooling, the rust developer libraries, the solidity developer libraries, TypeScript and other languages, all of those are already the most used developer libraries for Ethereum and base and optimism today, and that's because hats off again to Giorgio. She's spent years building this developer ecosystem, community around these dev tools. So, yeah, I'm very excited about it, because we're starting from such a good starting point. The thing that's interesting, on top of all that, is the features that we've added for tempo that are stable coin specific. And this is basically taking learnings over many years, and it relates also to why we're building layer one is that we can codify into the chain itself, a lot of critical infrastructure for stable coins. So the stable coin standard itself, instead of ERC 20, which is something built on top of Ethereum, we have something called tip 20, which is a native stable coin standard on tempo. And the fact that it's native, as opposed to being a layer on top as a smart contract, means that we can make payments fees separated from other fees of other types of transactions, to make sure that the fees remain constant. We can also codify in things like white lists and blacklists and minting and burning admin privileges, a lot of things that you guys talk about on the podcast, that businesses need if they're like a real business trying to do real payments. We've just turned those into low level blockchain primitives. There's tons more I can go into detail on including we have a native exchange on the blockchain for FX. We also have admin privileges for accounts so that you can find which types of tokens you receive, which types of senders and receivers you want to interact with. A lot of you know, from the blockchain point of view, it can sometimes seem a little bit boring, because people are so used to crazy things in blockchain land. But from the financial infrastructure world, these are, like, obvious things you need. So for me, I've just tried to be the guy that's tried to translate. What does tradify need? Let's make sure that we're satisfying every requirement, but we're doing it in a way that's crypto native. So that's, that's basically the ethos of tempo.

Cuy Sheffield  22:41  

Yeah, it's, congrats. I think it's so cool to see third generation, like layer ones going live. That's what feels like we're on kind of third generation. And it's like, now the work starts. It's like, you get live, and then it's like, okay, how do you like, drive volume and adoption the ecosystem? And it's, it's a tough, tough job. And so I have a lot of respect for everyone inside layer one is driving it. And Raj, like, you've seen this firsthand, of like, another kind of third gen layer one that you're building. Like, how do you look at this emerging landscape of these next gen chains? And then, what does it take once you're live now, you got to go get people to use it. Like, how are you seeing the landscape.

Speaker 1  23:21  

I mean, the work just starts. It's like, when you get to mainnet, you're really just getting started. And I think certainly there's a lot of shared principles. And, you know, obviously, like monad and tempo just being part of the paradigm family. Like one is that, you know, l ones have been really, really improved now from back Kyle and you and you were building the visa days with, with each main net, and, like some of the other, you know, the older generations. So I think that's been awesome where the bottlenecks no longer exists, like the EVM is now perfected. And I think like projects like tempo are just doing an awesome job expanding the entire Tai am, of like, what we thought blockchains could really achieve. I think a lot of what blockchains were used before was really focused on crypto native use cases. I think projects like what Monet and Tampa are doing now are saying, hey, like we've solved all the bottlenecks. The Tai is much bigger. There's actually real, tangible use cases that are might seem boring for your you know, your average crypto native person, but we can kind of go tackle it together as well. But the work just starts now. There's still so much to do to just get the volume flowing, get the organizations flowing, get the products and the UX and DevEx correctly, and then with the agent, you know, the AI agent, boom that's happening right now. It's a really fun backdrop to what high performance EVMS can do now.

Cuy Sheffield  24:31  

Yeah, Simon, you might appreciate I was in a meeting with a bank the other day, and I just used the term like legacy chains. And they're like legacy chains, like blockchains, like, just this just happened, like, you're saying that there are, like, multiple generations of blockchains, like, I was just trying to understand what Ethereum was, and then now they're like second generation chains, third generation chains, and like the legacy chain. So the pace of innovation on the technical side in the blockchain ecosystem is dizzying. And. Some of the most talented engineers in the world are just building really cool features and like, it's not always the best tech that wins, but it's great to have great tech that's like happening in multiple parts of the ecosystem, to then go and build on something. But I mean, Kai, to your point. I mean, when you're trying to build software, you wouldn't use legacy databases or legacy infrastructure. You would prefer to use, like, the latest and greatest. And greatest. And so it's a really interesting point where these third generation blockchains are now like what folks should actually be thinking about as well.

Speaker 2  25:28  

And I would also add that there's been a massive shift just over a decade and a bit that blockchains even been around where originally these things were built out to be these extremely sort of cipher punk, maximally self sovereign kind of places where one could hold funds and have complete outsider kind of management of their funds from any banking system or from any real world commerce use case, it was literally this total outside world. And so a lot of the decisions that were made about blockchains were made within that lens, and you can see it in the early ethos of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that's that is very important, and we don't want to lose a lot of the key things that led to that, but it has simply not been a priority ever really to engage with the existing financial system. So I think it's really only in the past couple of years with the Chris and the genius Act and the willingness for companies to embrace stable coins, that we've been able to take the stance of, okay, let's, let's revisit the principles, to let the creation of the blockchain, of the technology, and try to design not outside of the system, but integrated within the system in a way that does not compromise on our principles, but is also not just unnecessarily antagonistic. And it's a very fine line to ride, because you don't want to lose those principles, but you also don't want to completely get absorbed within the old world. And so that's what we're trying to do with tempo. And it's very fun to do it, because there's a lot of interesting problems that you come across. But yeah, I think that's like, that's kind of where we're at with this industry.

Sy Taylor  26:58  

It's an interesting tension, isn't it? Liam, I know paradigm has been committed to base layer neutrality for quite some time. And Raj, something that monad shares as well. You can do that. But then there's all of these edge cases that come up if your base layer, if your blockchain is permissionless, on tempo, and I assume on monad as well. Raj, correct me, anybody can create a stable coin, anybody can have a wallet, and so that creates all of these different issues where, like, Okay, but how on earth is a giant enterprise going to come into that blockchain when they're worried about there's the whole issue of, like, being dusted by a sanctioned wallet, just the stuff that happens on some of the public chains, keeping the enterprises away from it, which, you know, Liam, we're working On features to kind of fix those little things, your adversaries could still technically use the chain, but you're giving tools to enterprises to mean they can still use it too, and those two things can be bifurcated.

Speaker 2  27:52  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this the one that I'm most excited to talk more publicly about soon, is privacy, where privacy is almost the perfect pinnacle of this entire topic, where a lot of the privacy solutions, if you see them, they're one of two types. They're either an extremely kind of cryptographic solution that has something to do with fully homomorphic encryption, or something that requires, like a bank or like a government to hold some sort of novel cryptographic key primitive and it's like very overly complex and confusing. Or on the other end of the spectrum, you have a company that is just simply offering sort of a private database as a service, but calling it a blockchain. And this has been the type of thing that we've seen in the industry. It's like these two ends of the spectrum. What we're trying to do with privacy, with tempo, and we'll talk more publicly about this soon, is thread the needle where it's still fully permission, is still fully self custodial, but you get the benefits of what that directional thing of the private blockchain was supposed to be without losing interoperability. So that's our hope with that product. I think it's going to be really exciting once we get it out there. But yeah, that's the whole ethos.

Sy Taylor  28:53  

Kai, any thoughts on the fragmentation risk if we're on generation three of chains? I know visa is already supporting blockchains. You've done a lot of work there. How are you thinking about how this market plays out? What's your hypothesis right now?

Cuy Sheffield  29:06  

I don't know. I think what's really interesting to me about the current state of the market is the agentic opportunity is just so big. It's such a big opportunity, and we're just seeing some of the smartest, most creative entrepreneurs and builders just like, sprinting towards it and working harder than they ever have. And like, that's, it's like driving like our team, like we're working harder and faster longer than we ever have. And like, I'm sure you all are too like, it's, it's just, was the meme. It's like the smartest people you know right now are all locked in, like we're all locked in. It just feels like there's a whole space is accelerating, and it's gonna be one of the largest, like commerce, payments markets that we've ever seen. And there's not really time to have, like a zero sum approach to think, oh, we gotta, like. Compete with this other chain or compete with this like, it doesn't matter, it's it's like, if you could get on the train and, like, get in the game, there's like, enough room for like, everyone to succeed and to do very, very well. And so I think that we're actually turning a corner into, like, one of the most collaborative parts of payments that it's like, we're all trying to build a new ecosystem from the ground up, whether you're a blockchain, whether you're a card network, whether you're a merchant, like, it just doesn't even matter. And it's like, if we can unlock the ability for agents to be able to, like, pay and be paid, that's huge. And so it's just it's hard to, like, spend a lot of time. I just don't really think it's a good use of time being like, Oh, is it gonna be tempo or monad? Like, who cares? Like, just, just build and like, whatever works the best. Use everything. So like that. That's our approach. Is, like, we want to make cards work everywhere. We want to enable it to be as easy as possible for an agent to pay or be paid. We want to support every chain we want, like, and I think that that's the approach you have to take. You always, you always. You have to prioritize, like, what are you going to do first? But there's so much opportunity for everyone in the market right now that it's a really fun time that, like, we're all trying to build something new.

Sy Taylor  31:11  

The last word, what are you hoping people are going to build on Main net? What are you excited to see coming from the builder energy?

Speaker 2  31:16  

Yeah, I think that it's very difficult to predict, you know, what they're going to build. I mean, if I knew what they were going to build, maybe we would already have built it. I think to Kai's point, the whole idea is just give extremely high quality tools and extremely high quality standards and see where people's imagination takes them. Like even yesterday, we saw someone at a sandwich shop in New York that all of a sudden were accepting payments. And we had people just making payments over their cloud code instances to buy a sandwich. We had, like an internal sandwich dashboard. Even it was kind of funny. And I even just right now in the office, I saw two people building these kind of, like robotic dog type things, and was controlling them with their agents. And they built even a server that let you pay a couple dollars to do an action. A friend of mine is building, kind of a music application. I think Kai, also, you've been working on something like this, where you could pay to get your song included next on the track list if you're at an event like these are just really creative new things, and no one ever really had the ability to do before, because it's been too much friction to get a payment included in something like that. So honestly, who knows? Like, personally, I feel like we're in a bit of a renaissance right now, not even in just payments, but just broadly in computing, because of AI that it's impossible to predict even where we're going to be in a year. So just build really good primitives. Just take your imagination and run wild with it. And our hope is that we can just provide the underlying tooling to make it

Sy Taylor  32:33  

very easy indeed. Kai made some great points as well. In payments, everybody is your friend of me, because nobody runs the whole market. And I think it's interesting to see the crypto space maturing into that, and some of the folks that were sort of like religious chain believers, maybe falling away from influence, and kind of the pragmatists taking over a little bit. And that's how we build real things that solve problems for people. So as the long suffering disappointed dad of crypto, I'm super excited to see like the builder energy now, and we're getting real traction. So yeah, tempo dot XYZ. Docs, dot tempo dot XYZ, or go to wallet, dot tempo dot XYZ. If you really want to play with some stuff, the team built a new Explorer as well. That's really fun to play with. But before we get to the last story, I've got to hear from our sponsors who make this show possible. So let's do that now, 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. Stable coins are building blocks for borderless financial services making money move around the world as easily as data. With stripe you can use stable coins to reach untapped customers, reduce cross border fees and settle payments in minutes instead of days. Best of all, it works the same way that stripe products do by API or in the stripe dashboard, meaning you don't have to worry about the intricacies of which blockchain? Which wallet will you custody from Shopify to vercel, global businesses, trust stripes, complete crypto solutions to unlock new markets and reach more customers. Borderless finance built on stripe. Learn more@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 PSP. 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 All right. Last story this week was MasterCard. You may have heard of them. Have acquired bvnk for $1.8 billion so BB and K, former sponsor of the show, I think Chris harms, has been on the show more than any other guest processes, $30 billion annually for companies like wallpay and deal and D local across more than 130 companies. There's a really interesting line here where MasterCard, CPO said something that I found really interesting, which was, we expect most financial institutions in time will provide digital currency services as a default, which I thought was really prophetic. Raj coming to you on this you podcast host on Money Code, there was the whole back story here to what would happen with BB and K. Do you want to just unpack some of the things that have been happening with those guys and where they sit in the landscape? Yeah.

Speaker 1  36:22  

The landscape, yeah. I mean, you know, vv and k is obviously really established themselves as, like, one of the leading stable coin orchestration companies, and, to your point of has worked with ton of different PSPs organizations around the world. I think this announcement, like, further legitimizes, you know, stable coins more, especially across like the financial institution space. I think all of us here have been speaking the gospel of stable coins and blockchains for a while, but it's always these types of moments that you start to see more external validation from the market. And it just shows that things are just heating up. I think the infrastructure that's being built, collectively by all of us, MasterCard has also seen that. It is now taking a pretty big bet around it too. And you know, the bvnk team has been world class and trying to go after it. So I'm excited to see how it plays out. I think it's another, another big chapter of, like, this entire moment, of like, the stable coin space. And so it's gonna be fun to see what's next

Sy Taylor  37:14  

to Kai that statement, we expect most financial institutions will get into digital currencies. You've been saying for a while, every company, every bank, needs a stable COIN strategy. What are you seeing in your conversations? How are they changing in the day job?

Cuy Sheffield  37:28  

So first, congrats to Jesse. Chris don like leaving Kay is an amazing team. I think it's a great outcome. I think it's great for the industry. I don't think that much has changed over the past few months, I think that there have been these like inflection points over time. Over the past 12 and 18 months, there was the stripe acquisition of bridge, and that was a major inflection point. So that was like a leg up, and then there was like genius act passing, like, that's like a leg up. Now, I think there's just like a steady grind up in a realization that every bank needs a stable court strategy. And, like, I actually haven't been saying it as much lately, because it's just so obvious. Everyone's like, who cares? Like, it was obviously, like, there's no point of, like, saying something if it's just like, everyone agrees. And so I stopped saying it, so we're not on the bingo card anymore.

Sy Taylor  38:18  

Now, now it's all about command line commerce. You're gonna make that one happen. I mean, most people don't

Cuy Sheffield  38:23  

know what that is. It's a I've got to say it enough until people know what it means. Yeah, I think it's I think there's still a bunch of questions around which use cases to prioritize, and how to approach kind of building partner, buying the infrastructure that you need to support them. And then how do you manage risk and compliance? It's easy to go from this isn't a priority, we don't care about this, to like this is a priority. We got to figure it out so that could happen very quickly. The figuring it out of how like, then there are false starts. You go one direction, you change your bet. Like, it's just hard. It's hard for any large institution to go from we have never done anything on chain to, how do we like dip our toes in to do something on chain, to how do we rebuild our entire business on chain and like that, to be as like, a decade plus journey. And I think pretty much everyone in the world is somewhere on that journey, and most of them are between the like, we figured out that it's important, like, we should have a team, and like, we should, like, be in the space to like, we're starting to go down it, and everyone's at a different point, and it's gonna take long time. We're here to help, we're spending a bunch of time with banks all over the world, but, yeah, I think now it's just kind of an obvious it's happening one day at a time.

Sy Taylor  39:48  

Well, I know you guys launched an advisory arm to help with that, and I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to explain all the different providers in the ecosystem, and an orchestrator versus, like, a wallet versus a custodian versus liquidity provider. It is, and all that kind of stuff. Lib you had a baptism of fire of like meeting enterprises over the last six months. What's kind of been your observation of, you know, the conversations you've had with banks and other enterprises, and how does this differ from your decade plus in in the crypto space? Yeah, I think

Speaker 2  40:15  

it's been very interesting working with banks and even just working with large enterprises. My broad interpretation is that a lot of them are seeing this world that is opening up to them, and they're just like, Where do I even start? There's so much complexity, and there's so many people telling me different stories. So at least for me, what I try to do is I just try to, like, give as clear a picture as possible of the history of how did we get here, where are we going next? What are your kind of options or paths to take and just keep it as simple and in their language as possible, versus trying to, you know, scare them off with something that's maybe too cipher punk or too kind of out of left field for them. So I don't know. I think that Kai is right, that everyone needs a stable COIN strategy. I think it's going to take them a bit of time to figure it out, but the ones that are moving faster will probably just be more successful. And I would also encourage pretty much every single one of them to to not be afraid and take a little bit of time to dive in, play around with use some of the blockchains for yourself. Use some of the coding agents and some of this agentic payment stuff. Just start, start yourself personally, trying things out to get an intuition for what's going on. And I think that'll help uncover a lot of answer to a lot of questions. But yeah, I think it's going to be fun solving the requirements. It's again, if it sounds almost boring, I've just like, work through these requirements and solve them in a blockchain kind of way. But yeah, I think it's going to be exciting.

Cuy Sheffield  41:33  

It's a really good point that you made of one thing that has changed between now and, like, three months ago. I think in the US, there was still a big question of, like, what is the stable coin use case? Why do I need stable coin infrastructure? And the only use case was really like, cross border remittances, B to B. Those are the things that came up outside the US. It was like screaming, obvious. Of like, Oh, these are dollars. Like, we could get access to dollars. And so everyone outside the US was already like, yes, this could be a big deal. I think that a lot of the banks in the US were still like, my customers aren't asking me for this. Like, why do I need to do anything? But like, genius act is here is I have to do something. So it's a lot more confusing. I think now where this, like, command line commerce concept matters is I'm in the US and I'm using stable coins more than I ever have because, like, I'm using it inside the command line, and a bunch of other smart people are like, building around that as well. And so I think we could start to see agentic become a use case that is San Francisco and out into like us developed markets, where stable coins have a role to play. Now, when I say stable coins have a role to play, my opinion and what I've seen and experienced, and what I think is the best outcome for consumers and merchants and businesses is I think we're going to start to see almost like the AI mullet. We've talked about like the defi mullet for a while, and you've got FinTech in the front and you got crypto in the back. Now, I think what we're going to start to see is like the AI mullet. It's like cards in the front and stable coins in the back. And I think a lot of the things that we've been building over the past few years, like stable coin settlement, work really, really well to enable transactions to move on chain, to be able to pay a merchant endpoint that's doing image generation. And like, to me, it's crazy to think, if you're selling image generation and like, that's what you do as a merchant, and you're now selling it over MPP, and you're selling it as an endpoint, you shouldn't have to wait three days until Monday to get paid. Because you got GPU bills, you got to pay those bills like those things are burdened. But that doesn't mean that every consumer has got to figure out how to on ramp into a stable coin when, like most consumers in the US are like, I don't need that. So to me, the magic moment and what we're building and working on, and what I'm using, personally and a few other visa employees are is cards. In the front, I give my agent a card it can transact to generate an image and stable coins at the back, and you can actually send a stable coin to that endpoint for that image, and they get that immediately. And so that's what I'm like, incredibly excited to figure out. Like, how do we scale that? Because it works. Now it's just like, really getting that out there into the market.

Sy Taylor  44:17  

It comes from a common misconception people have about cards, because cards don't move money. They authorize the movement of money. Banks move money. But sometimes that can be a bit slow, especially when it's cross border or over a weekend or something of that nature. And as you were saying, like I've been thinking about this model, let's say you vibe code something, and it's wildly successful, as happens in AI, but you're like, not VC backed. You don't have a bunch of cash to pay your GPU bills. Are you just going to turn that product off in the middle of hyper growth because you're waiting three days for money to come into your bank account so you can buy some more compute? Or do you need that money to get to you now? And that's why stable coin instant settlement is like, overpowered. It's op so. Kind of the core of it. And I think why those two sit together? Raja, I'm gonna give you final word on this story, and any other thoughts on the BV and K picture, the role of orchestration, the role of card networks, as you reflect on this story and the industry more broadly. Yeah.

Speaker 1  45:18  

I mean, I think, like we touched on, I mean, you know, stable coins are here to stay. It's gonna be a big part of, like, the future of, you know, what we expect for most banks and financial institutions also. And I think if you're not building in it, if you thought that, you know, you shouldn't have taken this technology seriously before. From all the series of announcements have taken place like this should hopefully be the wake up call to be like, get in gear. Get your cloud code going, get your wallet going. Play with tempo, play with monad. Play with all the different blockchains and stable coins, and off to the races, because this thing's not slowing down anytime soon.

Sy Taylor  45:50  

I think that is great advice and a good place to leave it. But just a quick anecdote. I was speaking to somebody at one of the global central banks this morning who was saying that they spent all day yesterday, vibe coding with tempo, and we're liking this and liking that. And yes, you should, and you should try other chains too, and that's how you learn. Do it on a personal device. Take care of yourself, try not to burn things in the process, like it's the wild west out there. You've got to be careful. But it's the perfect advice for everybody who's lost in this space. All right, I think that brings us to a close. One story we didn't have time to cover is that the some of the US regional banks are building a tokenized deposit network on ZK sync to rival stable coins. So be interesting to see where tokenized deposits fit. I think that's a another conversation for another day. We've talked a lot about that on this show in the past, but I want to thank Raj so much for being on the show. So really, really appreciate you. People want to find out more about you, about money code, about everything you do in at monad, where do they go to

Speaker 1  46:48  

do that? Yeah, you can find me on x, at Art Park, monad, at monad XYZ, and then yeah, you can find us on money, code on Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Thanks for having me.

Sy Taylor  46:58  

Heck yeah. Very welcome, sir and Liam. How about you?

Speaker 2  47:02  

Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Liam. I horn and, you know, just go to tempo at XYZ. MPP dot Dev. You can DM me on Twitter anytime. Happy to hack the chat,

Sy Taylor  47:11  

Kai, how about you

Cuy Sheffield  47:13  

on x at Kai, Sheffield and visa.com/crypto we've got a new site up, so check it out. Give us

Sy Taylor  47:18  

some feedback. Ooh, and you've got a visa CLI now, so hopefully people will check that out and give it some feedback as well. You'll find me at sy Taylor on all of the socials. You'll find me screaming into the void at FinTech, brain food.com and, of course, at Simon at tempo, dot XYZ. If you want to do anything fun on chain and you want to chat to me, thank you so so much for watching and viewing now going to do the host thing where I ask you to like and subscribe. It really helps us, if you can leave us a review or something, just interact and tell somebody you know about this podcast today, and podcast will go a little bit further. Appreciate you, and we'll catch you next time.