Visa Stablecoin Settlement Hits $20BN - Up 15X

Petrit Berisha  0:10  
Welcome to Tokenize, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name is Pep Risha, MD and co-creator of Tokenize, stepping in for Simon Taylor, who is abroad, but the British accent stays the same, and also no Kai today, and we do understand the intense irony of recording episode 100 of Tokenize without either of our hosts. But we're going to do the Moneyball thing of replacing them in aggregate. So stepping in today is the returning and wonderful guest co-host for today, Elise Susie Watts, former regulator, policy and regulatory specialist, and friend of the podcast. How are you, Elise?

Elise Soucie  0:50  
Hi, everyone. So great to be back, and I'm very honored to be filling in for Kai in this episode, especially as episode 100. I am joining from my maternity leave, so that's why I haven't been around as much lately. But super excited to rejoin, as there's been so much going on in the digital assets world. So thanks for having me back.

Petrit Berisha  1:10  
Thanks for joining and joining us this week, making their debut, Cyril Matthew, co-founder and CEO of Latitude. How are you, man?

Cyril Mathew  1:18  
I'm good. Thanks for having me on. I've known Kai and Simon for six plus years, so I'm I'm refreshed to speak to new people on this version of the pods. Excited,

Petrit Berisha  1:27  
sick of those guys, and we do have a returning guest, Matt Marcus, co-founder and CEO at Modern Treasury. How are you, Matt?

Matt Marcus  1:35  
Doing well. It's good to see you, Pat. Last time we hung out, you're eating a tomahawk steak. So indeed, I was a bit of a different scene this time, but happy to be here.

Petrit Berisha  1:44  
Before we get into the show, a couple of quick bits. I need to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they represent. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial investment, or legal advice. Do your own research. Also, I'm happy to remind you that this podcast is sponsored by Fireblocks.

Sy Taylor  2:06  
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 firebox.com. All

Petrit Berisha  3:00  
right, over to story one. A company called Modern Treasury launches non-custodial stablecoin wallets, pairing them with global USD accounts and fiat money movement in one API in early access across the U.S. and 90 plus countries. Matt, I do a Simon here and read the story out, but since you're here in the virtual flesh, tell us more about this story.

Matt Marcus  3:24  
Yeah, so I'm the co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury. We're a global payments platform, and we announced yesterday that we rolled out non-custodial stablecoin wallets as part of the platform. So, bigger picture, we have this global money movement platform. We work with like fintechs and marketplaces and businesses who are looking to move money around the world. Sometimes they just move money within the U.S. Sometimes it's across borders. We rolled out the ability to create these non-custodial stablecoin walls for our our customers and ultimately for our customers and users as part of Modern Treasury. One of the things we have is this you know consolidated ledger that works across both fiat and stablecoin, so means basically you can use fiat and stablecoin through one platform in an easy way. And we work with platforms like Morse, as an example, used to be called Sling Money to help them offer payments and accounts to their end users. And so we can help them, for example, take money that sits in stablecoin, convert it to fiat and make a payout in the U.S. over fiat payment rail, so like an RTP or Fed now payment or an ACH, and so you know the non-custodial offering complements the custodial one that we've we've had in market for since around February. So really, our customers can pick between the two depending on what works better for their business model. So we're excited about that. It's an early access at the moment and rolled out with folks like Morse at the moment.

Petrit Berisha  4:44  
Elise, what are your thoughts on this one?

Elise Soucie  4:46  
First of all, like huge congrats! It's it's a huge milestone, and I think that there's definitely like a clear demand for it. Obviously, I also have followed along with what Sling Money has been doing for years, and know that those guys as. So I think it's really cool to see all of this sort of coming together. I guess maybe a question from my side: like, is there a default stablecoin that you guys are seeing in your ecosystem yet, or is it a bit more agnostic? How is that developing?

Matt Marcus  5:13  
Our view is, you know, we're infrastructure for payments. We're not maximalists on a certain stablecoin, so we, you know, we support like USDG, USDT, USDC, and also different chains for that matter. I think my view is that we probably aren't going to have a like a ton of really dominant stablecoins. There'll be a few that end up, you know, really like getting the trust required to hit scale. You know, and I would argue that some of those are already there today. So from an infrastructure perspective, like we are adding support for more over time as our customers ask for them, but we don't like push our customers towards a specific one or you know incentivize them in some way. Yeah, they might have their own incentives that push them towards using certain chains as an example, but that's not something that we talk about really at Modern Treasury.

Elise Soucie  6:00  
No, that makes sense because I think, in a way, the sort of the market will decide, and and as you say, users will decide what's best for them, and that may be diversified based on region or their specific use case as well. But what what do you think, Pat?

Petrit Berisha  6:12  
I mean, I just kind of went back to thinking about a story where someone tried to pay us in a stablecoin, probably about nine months ago, and I was like, "We'd prefer a bank transfer, and the reason was when I thought about in my head, I was like, "Well, we're going to have to be paid into Kraken. I'm going to have to then withdraw that from Kraken. I'm going to then have to tell our accountants that this is the payment that needs to be reconciled against this invoice, and you know, in the UK, you could get it sent to your Revolut business account, but we didn't have one set up yet, and then go straight into the dollar and keep it in that bank account. I do think the kind of payouts as a use case for stablecoins is is growing at a at a real rate right now, especially in businesses who have those kind of fringe case issues, like once one customer asks for it, you never know when when another is going to. So you may as well implement some form of solution. I have another example. I was putting together a a syndicate investment soft plug, and like I was shocked that probably about 30% of the people in this syndicate wanted to fund via stablecoins, and the platform were like, "We're nowhere near touching that. And I was like, "For the next one, can we please do that? And in the next one, they still didn't allow it, so I actually just made two or three intros with people who could facilitate a stablecoin pay-in? So you're you kind of are getting slowly a lot of like demand on the the user side, but also from businesses that are trying to accept stablecoins as a method of payment. I mean, Matt, I want to double click on the demand from businesses and clients. Like, what is that looking like, and what type of thing are they using it for?

Matt Marcus  8:00  
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're mentioning there, there's still like a pretty real fear of stablecoins from a lot of traditional businesses, and so you know, we we talk with a lot of folks who are frankly nowhere near ready for that. That's not to say that they never will be; it's just where where they are right now. I think where we are in the market, like most folks using stablecoins, are this like early adopter mindset, or they're thinking about innovating in some way, and I think we see a demand from like two pockets broadly. Like pocket one are the platforms like Morse who are building out like net new financial products using stablecoins. The core part of them, and they're for their users, they're not necessarily putting stablecoins front and center. That's just how they you know deliver their products or platforms. The second camp is more other infrastructure and orchestration platforms because we think about what stablecoins enable. A lot of it is just behind the scenes around how companies manage their own liquidity, how they settle with partners, and so you have a lot of orchestration and payments platforms and other geographies that you know might be looking to partner with modern treasuries, an example because we have strong offerings, let's say in the U.s1. of the other customers we mentioned in in the press release we put up was Depa. So you know Depa is a strong platform in Europe, and we're partnering with them, and they're using our our software and our platform for access to you know the noncustodial wallet solution, the fiat payment rails inside of the U.S. And so I think, like bigger picture, there's still a lot of infrastructure that's just being laid out, and like us as a you know composable infrastructure provider, we can work with those types of platforms and give them great access to U.S. rails that are stitched together with stablecoins.

Elise Soucie  9:34  
And maybe one more question for me on that that U.S. rails point because I think this is really important, and it's something that gets talked about a lot by you know global standard setters and and various geopolitical bodies is that there is obviously like huge demand for dollar denominated savings, particularly in like more volatile markets and even sometimes in not volatile markets. Given that obviously the majority of stablecoins that we see today are dollar back. But of course, alongside that, you then have dollarization, which can have its own impacts globally. So I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that as you guys have been rolling out.

Matt Marcus  10:11  
Well, so there's two things there. One is like the payment methods. So you know we we're connected to the U.S. fiat payment methods, ACH, RTP, Buster Card checks, checks, and you know, when we think about that, like a lot of these global platforms have users who need to like pay a bill to somebody in the U.S. or collect the investment from someone in the U.S. and those go over fiat, and then they need to you know on and off rampant the stablecoin. The other question, like around dollarization, I think this is an interesting one of like, do we think that most stablecoin activity will be denominated in dollars. Will we have other non-dollar denominated stablecoins? I'm of the view that I think it will probably be mostly dollar-dominated. I think in order for there to be like deep enough liquidity in these markets, it's just going to be difficult to like do that if we if we have you know other currencies that don't have the same benefits of the dollar. Definitely some concerns around like sovereignty for some countries, like what it was mean for my own currency. But since this is you know easier to access, I think people like figure out a way around. They they already have, and you know I think like for me or for us, like you know in America, it's actually it's probably a good thing that this is all like trending towards dollar denominated. Like I'm happy about that. I think it's a great tool for soft power for the country. You know, makes the dollar more important around the world. So I can see why other places would be concerned about it. But for us, you know, I think the dollar-backed stablecoins is a great thing.

Elise Soucie  11:35  
Yeah, it's a good point, and I think that I mean, I sit as an American based in the the UK, and we have these conversations all the time, and I I think that my personal view is that there is like a middle ground to be found. Where actually, if you look at traditional financial markets and how much of that is you know dollar denominated and how much the dollar is used across various markets in FX, et cetera, obviously you would expect that to be mimicked in the stablecoin ecosystem. However, there probably is a place for local-denominated currency stablecoins too. Coming back to the sovereignty point for local transactions for local businesses, not for the cross-border piece necessarily. So I'll be really interested personally to see that how it evolves. It's it's a personal watching interest of mine, but I agree. At the moment, it seems like dollar stablecoins are still remaining fairly dominant. So, one to watch for sure.

Cyril Mathew  12:25  
If I could sneak in a follow up, Matt. So, I was just curious on the use case here. Do you guys see that it's more the latter point you mentioned, which is the payment rails paying vendors in the U.S. versus oh, I'm in a high volatile currency market and I wanted as a savings instrument, which I see more of on social media.

Petrit Berisha  12:44  
Stole my question.

Matt Marcus  12:46  
Okay, we're we're more exposed to the latter, but we're to the infrastructure plumbing side of things. I mean, because I think in the grand scheme of things, like as much as we see around stablecoins, like we're we're still like one out top of the first inning, or maybe I should use the baseball analogy, but anyway, like you know, we like it's it's still super early, like, and I think that we at Modern Treasury have a history of working with like lots of you know super traditional businesses or just like companies doing B 2b payments, like Navon as an example, like you know for companies like that, like the the type of plumbing and like what what they need is all still being laid out there, and so I think we're really excited about like powering that and supporting those companies that are looking to do that.

Petrit Berisha  13:28  
I think this might be a first time for the show where we have two announcements. It's definitely the most embargoed release I've been sent in a week for tokenized. Latitude raises a $35 million Series A led by Oak HCFT with NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed faction, and OpenFX to connect stablecoins to local payment rails like PIX, UPI, and MobileMoney. Again, I would read out the entire press release, but Cyril, since we have you here, tell us more about this. It follows 8 million seed from March 2026 and takes your total funding to $43 million. Huge congrats!

Cyril Mathew  14:04  
Thank you. Yeah, it's really really humble to be able to have the capital to grow. I think taking a step back, a little bit of my personal background. Pat, you sort of set it up for me. The the problem you mentioned about getting a stable coin, going to your Kraken account, all of these things. I I was one of the early leads on USDC when I was at Coinbase. This was back in 2020 21, and trying to grow that. I went to Stripe soon after. To Stripe still had banned crypto at the time. A lot different now, but I was one of the early team members to help launch crypto at Stripe. And the first product we had launched there was stablecoin payouts. We could only payout in about 50 countries where we had banking rail. So we thought, let's do a pilot where we can do stablecoin payouts to 100 plus countries. In that pilot, really no one was using that, and and the vast majority of the feedback we got was, well, what do I do with the USDC in Vietnam or or Ghana or Colombia or whichever country it may have been in. In addition to like, what wallet do I download? And then, oh, you go find an exchange to try to off-ramp. So for me, the light bulb went off. Is this would be a global payment rail that really helps move in and out and do global payments? You've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies in efficient, compliant ways. And so that was one of the sparks. Latitude. What our goal is is really to help stablecoins become a global payment rail by solving kind of those last mile problems, so that that manifests in two products. One is a global payouts product that a marketplace or a payroll company can use to do payouts in fiat. We're using the stablecoin sandwich, the proverbial term, and the second product is really just a set of on and off ramp, so I can go from stablecoin to Filipino peso, stablecoin to India rupee, stablecoin to Brazilian real, and you know maybe it's a partnership we'll talk to Matt about later. But you know once those those users are holding stablecoins for a while, and if it's not a Morris who has some of the rails built, how do they get into those local currencies? That's what we want to enable, and so yeah, we're excited. And the the other thing I'd mention is we felt it was very important to be regulated on day one, and so that's what we we were sort of busy building that over the last year and a half, getting our licensing in the U.S. building compliance in house because we felt that's really important if an enterprise is going to trust us to help move money.

Petrit Berisha  16:15  
Amazing! I mean, you you guys are both at Stablecon, so I'm sure we we could do like the first ever live deal on the show, but I'll let you guys take that behind behind closed doors. Elise, more awesome news. What are your thoughts on this one?

Elise Soucie  16:28  
Well, again, yeah, huge congrats for me as well. This is like such a wonderful industry success story, and obviously, it is my job always on this podcast to come back to policy and regulation. So, I definitely want to commend you on a couple of regulatory points, which is first, you coming out of stealth, sort of post genius act. That is like exactly the success story that the industry has kind of been talking about for ages. Which is that when you have regulatory clarity, you can have the capital unlock, and then you can have that scalability. And so I think that for me is first of all, huge, but also the money transmitter licenses and going and getting all of those state by state approvals, massive well done. Because like I feel like people think of this as this like really boring infrastructure. As you say, you've got to go out, you have to be compliant, you want to be regulatory first, but actually doing the work to go out and get all of those individual approvals. It takes time. It takes patience. You have to explain the product. You have to work with the regulators. And I think it sometimes seems like the boring thing to do, but actually, that matters so much in terms of long-term compliance and your regulatory standing and your work with obviously very highly regulated other partners across financial markets, and so I'm personally very pleased to see crypto and digital assets moving a little bit away from the move fast, break things, worry about all the regulation later, and instead have like a regulation first trend. So really, really want to commend you guys for that, and I think that's definitely hopefully reflected in your guys's seed round in terms of that long-term confidence that your investors have had as well. So definitely, hats off for me. But my next question then is that: Is there anything next? Do you feel like there's anything missing for you from a regulatory perspective that's needed in the stack to give even more certainty?

Cyril Mathew  18:19  
Yeah, I would thank you for that, and yeah, it it also pays off. I think for a company as early as us to have the right investors, even when we raised our seed round, which NEA led, we told them this is our plan. Before instead of going to market quickly, we've seen a lot of people ask, "Well, I've heard like 30 or 40 stable fund orchestration companies. I would argue a lot of them have just built on someone else's rails or on another sponsor bank, got to market quickly, but we don't think that's sustainable. And so we told our investors, getting us close to the battle, owning our own compliance decisions, being regulated on day one was very important. We have most of our money straight state money transmission licenses. That what's next with this capital is the second part of we think our differentiation is really the global coverage. There, there are stablecoin orchestration companies, even two that have been recently acquired that are really great. But we don't see any that are one regulated themselves, two have global coverage. We see pockets where there's a lot of Latino players, Africa players, etc. but have the global coverage. And everyone also says more important than one API is one onboarding. Like the fact that we're regulated, we can go not get non-resident accounts with banks in Brazil or in Southeast Asia, and what that means is when you onboard a latitude, because we have these reliance relationships with banks, you could do one onboarding. So you're not saying, hey, plug into one API, but onboard with 15 partners, then a company's not going to integrate for two years. So we we feel for us using this capital is getting licensed in some of these markets, building out that global network, and then really just assembling the best team to kind of do this expansion. And so that's that's how we're planning to differentiate, and we believe we can really serve enterprises in this way and scale beyond just you know your mom and pop shops, if that makes sense.

Elise Soucie  19:57  
One more question for me, and then I'll hand it back to you, but. I guess my other question is, how are you thinking about like industry fragmentation? Because if you look at the like traditional cross-border payments industry, it gets so fragmented, particularly across various use cases, various regions. Obviously, as you mentioned from the outset, you're trying to solve that. But do you think that we actually have a chance here to kind of do better in this next iteration of financial services, and instead, really reduce that fragmentation for the end user.

Cyril Mathew  20:28  
Yeah, I do. I mean, I I would caveat that you know I've been in payments for a while, and there's never a one size fits all in payments. You're always going to have multiple players, and I don't think there's ever a winner take all. That being said, I think what stablecoins has done is solved, particularly how to go from one point to the other. You used to have to go through correspondent banks and go through several hops. Now you can go from the U.S. like Matt and Montreux just straight to a non-custodial stablecoin wallet to the user in the Philippines. And so, what we need to do is solve that fragmentation as patchwork of these last mile off and off ramps, and so I think we can improve drastically from companies who built cross borders before stablecoins were around. And then when you look at companies that are built in the stablecoin era, which is still relatively new, I think the biggest piece missing is they're still not. I've seen a dominant player that provides the last mile across 50 different currencies, right, and and does so in a deeply liquid way, in a way that you have as close to the metal integrations as possible, and so that that is our focus to kind of minimize fragmentation in that sense. So then again, let's just continue since Matt's on the line. If someone like Bonner Treasury was going to look at off ramps in 40 countries, you don't have to plug into 15 different partners, or else you're not going to prioritize this till 28 or 29. Now, I'm not saying LabSheet will be the only solution that does that, but I think we have a good leg up in terms of trying to solve some of that that fragmentation. How

Matt Marcus  21:51  
are you? If I can ask a question, how are you finding for those last mile delivery? You know, the FIs you're looking at in these other countries. What's the readiness like to settle with them in stablecoin,

Cyril Mathew  22:01  
yeah, it varies a lot. And this is the actually you hit one point I forgot to mention is the companies that have built really good networks pre stablecoins. One of the challenges when I was getting helping to launch Stripe crypto at Stripe was our existing bank wouldn't actually support the stablecoin flows, and so we had to go find a new sponsor bank in the U.S. etc. And so, internationally, a lot of these companies have built these global networks. Those same banks aren't yet supporting it. So it is a lot of sort of BD muscle, research muscle, and say, okay, which bank? Well, first, where is there clarity in that given market? If it's a Japan, a Philippines, or Brazil, that the banks can do something with space. Then, what bank has built liquidity or built the kind of stablecoin native support, and then going striking a deal with them. And so, I'm also, I believe, in 10 years we'll have the solution across 200 countries. I'm not a stablecoin zealot in thinking that these flows can work better in 100 plus countries yet. There's not enough liquidity in many of these markets. There's not enough regulatory clarity, but we're in 50 plus, and that's growing. And so, typically, it's either a bank, a local exchange like you know Bitso in Mexico is an investor of ours, or a payment provider that has like the equivalent of an EMI type license that are providing these flows for us. And eventually, we're going to go get some of those internationally with this new capital as well. But that's sort of the breakdown of the last mile partners, which it's still different levels of maturity, and and I think that's what the industry still needs a bit of maturation on, but it's happening quickly.

Petrit Berisha  23:23  
On that piece, you mentioned some of the people on the cap table are helping with that last mile. I'm curious to hear OpenFX, another really interesting company. We've had we've had the team on the show before. Is having that kind of like on-chain FX partner on the cap table helping a lot with the stablecoin sandwich piece as you kind of go for the payouts into specific markets.

Cyril Mathew  23:45  
Yeah, the the really interesting thing with OpenFX, a lot of people asked, and it's good to have them with the cap table. Was they're like, "Oh, are you competing with OpenFX? Actually, you know what we want to do, and at least you know I don't want to put words in their mouth, but since they've invested in us, you know what their goal is to serve customers like us and have 200 these institutional customers that are coming to get liquidity from them, and I'll just give you an example. Today we can go to a last mile provider in Mexico or Philippines. That last mile provider would have provided liquidity and the the local fiat payout. With OpenFX, what we can do is because their their expertise is in getting liquidity, not just on chain from let's say USDC to MXN to Fiat, and they came from Falcon X, and so they've they've really mastered the market making in these markets, and so they can get what may have been a 15 or 20 basis point spread down to two or three. We take advantage of OpenFX to get that liquidity, but we still use our bank partner for the last mile payout. So we're interfacing with the customer in the U.S. that's making the payout. OpenFX is interfacing with us to give us the liquidity, and then we do that last mile payout. And there's there's others, you know, in the space that does dissimilar to them. So we're not completely only using OpenFX for that. And but that's a kind of really good use case where they do what they do best in helping us provide liquidity. We still take care of the regulated last mile delivery and. Really, just helped us to compete with traditional finance on kind of the FX rates.

Petrit Berisha  25:04  
And on that piece, are you are you picking the stablecoin that has the most liquidity dependent on pairs, or is it depending on what the consumer wants to receive?

Cyril Mathew  25:14  
Great question. What the

Petrit Berisha  25:15  
consumer wants to send, rather.

Cyril Mathew  25:16  
Great question. I think similar to what Matt said with them, we we want to be pretty agnostic on stablecoins. There's there's probably two fork that I would mention when it is the use case, and which is why I think it's exciting when Modern Treasury's launch. We've even seen payroll platforms that have said, "Hey, my users actually don't want to go to the last mile; they just want to hold the stablecoin in their wallet. And in that case, the consumer will have an opinion on the wallet or stablecoin they want. In the use case of I'm just trying to get the last mile delivery. Typically, our customers have no opinion there, and then it matters what's the most liquid in that market. Tether sometimes controversial. It happens to actually still be the most liquid in a lot of international markets. USDC has grown a lot to get the liquidity there. Paxos is another investor of ours. We're working with them to get USDG more liquid, but ultimately we have to, you know, do what's right for the customer, and that's typically what's most liquid. But we also have to make sure the right compliance is in place, so we can do blockchain analytics, make sure we've done the sanction screening and all of that. So there are some baseline table stakes on what stablecoins we can support, but from there it matters what's the most liquid.

Petrit Berisha  26:19  
Fascinating, fascinating. Well, we'll pause here before we get into part two, so Simon can tell you about the sponsors that make tokenize possible.

Sy Taylor  26:30  
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Petrit Berisha  27:52  
Welcome back. We'll go straight into story three, which is a MoneyGram launches the MoneyGram card, a stablecoin linked Visa card built with Rain, Crossmint, and Stella live today in Colombia. Customers hold a stable dollar balance in the MoneyGram app. Are able to spend anywhere Visa is accepted, add it to mobile wallets, or transfer it to themselves and pick up cash at a MoneyGram location. Obviously, just been discussing that last mile a lot. Rain provides the card infrastructure, CrossMint the wallets, and Stella the network. And MoneyGram brings 60 million active customers, 200 plus countries, and nearly 500,000 retail locations. Colombia is the launch market, as it seems to be for a lot of these new stablecoin link cards and stablecoin products. More countries follow in the coming months, and a physical card for ATM withdrawals comes in late 2026. Also very interesting. And Rain also opened global payouts to 80 plus countries and 50 currencies, heading to 95 countries and 60 currencies by the end of the year. Also this week, Visa says its stablecoin settlement has passed 20 billion dollars at annualized run rate, and no Kai to tell you that from the horse's mouth, but I will instead. That's up 15x year on year with 160 plus stablecoin-linked card programs live, and volume on them up nearly 200% So I think Kai always has a saying, and the saying he's hammering home right now is stablecoin cards are in hyper growth mode. So, Sarah, I'll come to you first. Actually, just discussing that last mile problem, the the kind of MoneyGram story is super interesting, and actually, probably the most fascinating piece was their partnership with Paywood, Kraken's parent company, where you can actually go and take cash out after like a stablecoin remittance, which is super fascinating. I mean, the kind of refounding of MoneyGram is is a really interesting story to follow, regardless of how successful they they end up being. I'm curious to hear your take, considering the kind of payments expertise in so many different countries you've had.

Cyril Mathew  29:55  
Yeah, I think it's really exciting to see MoneyGram. We've seen others like Western Union, but this is money. Grams day, so I'll highlight them. Just they've been leaned into since I think they had the partnership with Stellar a few years back. I actually talked to them at prior roles, but it's cool to see this launched because again, similar to the previous story we're talking about, not everyone actually wants to immediately get out into low currency as much as I believe that's important. And so I think the the issuing of these cards is fascinating, but the physical locations that MoneyGram offers is incredibly powerful. Particularly, I think a lot of folks forget just how much in the global South there's so many markets that don't have cards that don't use cards. I was in a prior life at Uber trying to help Uber expand into markets in Africa, and there were just so many cash-dominated markets, and so that physical kind of footprint that MoneyGrams is real is real powerful. I would say, and just you know, again, not speaking for them, the difficult part is those aren't necessarily MoneyGram employees. So turning them on into how to use these stablecoin rails and figure out how to do the off-ramp and getting those agents that are in the MoneyGram network to do that is not necessarily easy. I think that's something that they've been working on for a while. But if they can get that right, it represents a huge opportunity that I think they could power many platforms off ramps where there aren't cards. And as much as stablecoin and cards are very hot right now, a lot of markets that's just not going to work. So I think it's very powerful.

Elise Soucie  31:16  
I would agree with that, and I think that the dollarization point does keep coming up. Like again, we have again here holding that sort of stable dollar balance, and I there is definitely demand for, especially where you do see restrictions with more volatile currencies. And I think the other point that's interesting here, and you know, you mentioned Pat that we've seen a lot of these sort of South America focused launches, especially in the past year or so. Sometimes when you speak in the sort of g7, g20 jurisdictions, there isn't necessarily that product market fit that there is in the global South. A global South that has traditionally been sort of underserved by the financial services industry of past, and so I think that there's an interesting intersection here of where you're having this launch from MoneyGram, where you already have the active customers, you have the demand. You're not trying to have this solution that's then retrofitted to a problem, which is sometimes I think that what we see, even in the UK, for example, where we already have a pretty sort of seamless payments network. You can send money to people very easily with your bank account. You know, we don't even have Venmo here or anything like that, and so I wonder what you guys think in terms of further launches. Do you think that we're going to see more and more of these in locations like Columbia, and also what impact do you think that that's going to have, you know, on the local economy? And to your point that you were making as well, with the part local partners that they'll need to find for these off ramps. Anybody have any thoughts on that?

Matt Marcus  32:44  
Well, I have to imagine that every company that is somewhat similar to MoneyGram is seeing this, seeing the Western Union news, and thinking, you know, what what are we going to do that that's somewhat similar? And they might have different techniques for you know last mile delivery, but I would guess that we're going to see a lot more activity like this just in general, some people will be better and worse at like you know solving problems or building good products. But my guess is we're still very early in terms of platforms like this coming out. The

Cyril Mathew  33:12  
question that I talked a little bit about earlier is just what does it take to have the right partner locally? I think the regulatory clarity is a key important point, which is why we see it in Colombia. You've even seen banks. Bank of Columbia has their own exchange a subsidiary called Winnia, and so a market like that is where I think why we see a lot of activity. One, there's already national cross-border traffic. Two, there's enough clarity for banks to move, and so you can create this ecosystem in that market where you can facilitate this. I also think just one more point on the dollar sovereignty. We certainly see that in in markets like India and Brazil, particularly the BRICS nations that don't like the dollar domination, if you will. But I I do see commercially when we're speaking to banks, they also believe that stablecoins making these cross border flows much simpler and easier will increase the total opportunity across border volume in that corridor, and so that commercial opportunity is very appealing to these banks, right? But there's just like again throwing out another former stop of mine at Uber when Uber made ride sharing so much easier. Taxi industries 10x or ride sharing the the ability people take cars 10x at those markets because you made it so much easier and so if stablecoins make moving money across the border so much easier if you can imagine that cross border volume 10 xing these banks find that opportunity hard to miss up even though they may not want more dollars in their in their country and so we've found that as a reason why banks have been moving in markets like Columbia,

Petrit Berisha  34:41  
I wrote in my notes that in the last 18 months, MoneyGram have launched MGUSD. They've launched a stablecoin card, cash withdrawals with with paywood and Kraken, validator on Tempo, and and maybe Stella. I think they use Stella pretty regularly. I think we had someone from Stella at a dinner we we hosted in in San Francisco who said that. Their RWAs have have kind of like gone 20 to 40x year on year on on chain. I'm presuming a lot of that is is in part due to stablecoins, and they're also part of Open USD. All in the last 18 months, I guess. Cyril, question for you: Where do you see MoneyGram's positioning in this from having this kind of huge moat that is kind of, I guess, being slowly eroded from loads of different companies in loads of different ways. How do you view their strategy in terms of what they've done for the for the last 1824 months?

Cyril Mathew  35:33  
I think it's refreshing the the fact that they're leaning in and seeing this technology shift. I think the innovators' dilemma is always the challenge for companies that have played in spaces like this and then see a huge technology shift. It typically doesn't go well for incumbents to move fast and adopt it. And so, MoneyGram's been investing in the space in a while. I would say the challenges are one that I called out earlier. A physical footprint is amazing, but turning that physical footprint and educating that physical footprint into embracing this new technology will be an uphill challenge. The other thing, if I if I'm strategy for MoneyGram, I would throw out there is that they have a chance, I believe, to be like a B 2b player for companies like myself or others, and and and how do these new fintechs, these new companies that are looking to enable cross border trade, leverage the MoneyGram network in a B 2b way, and so if they can turn on their network in a fast enough time, and then start to monetize on these new opportunities, that's what I would be looking at. But it's not easy when you've been operating one way for a certain amount of time. So I commend them for making these moves. The execution, which is I think the the biggest challenge for them, which hopefully they're up for.

Petrit Berisha  36:44  
Matt, any final thoughts before we move on to our last story? I

Matt Marcus  36:46  
think it's an interesting point there about the B 2b side. You mentioned working with Bitso a little bit earlier, and I think about that similarly. You know, they had this large consumer exchange historically that they built great payment rails into Mexico. So I'm curious to see if we see like more platforms that have you know lots of volume on the consumer side decide to pivot into B 2b because we talked about a little bit earlier a lot of platforms aren't quite ready to let's say accept stablecoins for settlement and folks like MoneyGram if they're building out the other infrastructure will probably be more ready sooner so that'd be welcome if you know if you're listening, or you know other folks that you have to to think about stuff like that.

Cyril Mathew  37:26  
Yeah, we've found a lot of consumer exchanges from the 1920 21 vintage now becoming payments companies to enable these sorts of these sorts of flows.

Petrit Berisha  37:36  
I'll move us on to our final story. This is a pretty insane one. Robinhood takes a minority stake in Crypto.com and its prediction markets arm OG.com and starts routing event contracts through OG.com's CFTC-regulated exchange starting from the eighth of September. So the stakes aren't disclosed, but according to Bloomberg, they're priced off Citadel Securities' July 2026 investment in Crypto.com, which values Crypto.com, I think, between 15 to 20 billion dollars, and OG.com at 5 billion dollars on its own. Robinhood now routes event contracts to OG.com, Kowshi, Forecast X, and Rothera, starting with NFL contracts for the season that kicks off this week, plus an election hub for the midterms. Prediction markets made Robinhood 156 million dollars of revenue in Q2 2026, up 10x year-on-year, trading 13.6 billion contracts, and it was the first quarter they outearned crypto trading. And this comes in the same week where Robinhood chain hit $42.6 million in revenue in the 70 days since its first July 2026 mainnet launch, which obviously we we covered exclusively on tokenized Soft plug, and it's I mean it's it's pretty wild. Robinhood chain is now actually outperforming Ethereum in daily revenue. I think this week. I guess most of it is meme coins. Disclaimer, but there is still quite a lot of activity with stock tokens, which of course have had their own pretty crazy back and forth. Vlad being on pretty much every every every cable network, and there's been the the AMC drama about well, like what do you own and the legalities around what consumers are buying here on the stock token side. I'm going to go to you first, Elise, because the acceleration in Robinhood's growth in like these new verticals is pretty insane. The staying power is obviously a little bit unknown, but they're kind of parlaying two things, which is kind of this this wholly earned chain using the the arbitrum stack, and then going all in on prediction markets, whilst at the same time a lot of their other verticals are still growing as well. So at the one point, it's kind of insane to see the level of execution, but also slightly worrisome from your perspective.

Elise Soucie  40:00  
Well, okay. I don't. I don't necessarily say worrisome, though. Obviously, whenever these things are happening very quickly, you often do see a regulatory lag. And I do want to caveat that even though I am a policy and regulation enthusiast, it is not always the fault of firms that regulation is lagging behind. And sometimes you do. I think it is important to sort of forge ahead and be innovative, and you know regulation will catch up. It always does. But yes, sometimes there can be some worries as well. The interesting things for me from this, and Pat, I really want to hear your thoughts on the NFL timing. Obviously, given that you do sporting crypto as well, I'm sure you have loads of thoughts on that. But the timing with the NFL, the midterms-I'm sure loads of people have been following along. What's been happening in Dallas this past week as well in terms of the campaigning? I mean, that timing is huge, and I think that, as you say, it really shows their intent to kind of roll this out as a core business line. But also, the interesting part about prediction markets really out earning crypto really show how that is kind of starting to become a core business model, not just this sort of fringe thing that I think people used to call it. But from my perspective, and I'll say one more thing before I pass it back to you guys, I think that the most interesting part on the chain bit, and people have focused on this kind of huge volume in meme coins. Well, I think it's important here to think about, like as you said, what those stocks actually are because they're really they're Jersey issued debt securities, and then they're approved by the Lichtenstein FMA under a bit of EU regulation, and so under that, that's technically not something that is available to U.S. customers under U.S. law. And so, I haven't seen a breakdown of region in terms of the meme stock distribution, but I think it might be really interesting to see that because is it actually that there's huge demand for meme coins, or is it just that these sort of stock tokens are actually not yet available to the kind of Robinhood core user base? So that's my question, not necessarily a fear, but I do think that that would be my kind of question mark around the meme coin heavy volume. I don't know if it is necessarily an indicator that the general populace is all of a sudden like meme coins to the moon, and we don't care about anything else.

Petrit Berisha  42:27  
There is some crazy things happening on the chain, though, as well. There's some really weird, interesting games that are blending stock tokens and meme coins. There's some, and and the the thing is, right? When you have these permissionless Or semi-permissionless infrastructures, anything that can happen will happen, right? And so you've even got Pump Fun saying, "Hey, like we might launch meme coins on Robinhood now because there's loads of people trading them, right? And so I do think there is a little bit of a risk that you kind of become the next meme coin chain, but I think that if Robinhood are able to parlay that into when they're allowed to in other jurisdictions, kind of move consumers through that gamut of like from buying a random meme coin to owning a tokenized stock, and and you know it's already proving to be a very successful revenue line for them. I think on the prediction market side, I think I'm probably like I think they're going to do really well with it short term and maybe even medium term. I do have questions about like fundamentally this is a brokerage and a brokerage should generate consumers' wealth or try to, and like a binary market means that you're unlikely to do that as a regular consumer. No matter how good you are at predicting sports or price action on stocks or elections, whatever it may be, you're most likely going to lose, especially in sports where the money is very sharp. And so I do worry about the kind of consumer churn there, if you're moving people from buying crypto in spot where they own or stocks that they, you know, own at least a digital receipt that that kind of grants them that stock on the on the underlying, like if a consumer then is ported over to trading meme coins or wagering on a sports contract and they lose money. That customer experience is completely different, and and it kind of talks about this with Coinbase as well, right? Coinbase are going pretty heavi prediction markets, and Coinbase make a lot of money from retail buying crypto on big margins for them on like the regular platform. If you're moving that consumer behavior, where you buy like $100 worth of Bitcoin. To I'm going to go $100 on yes no on this NFL game. That is a totally different consumer experience, and I think you're going to have a lot of churn, and that short term revenue might not be that sustaining. I'm curious, Sarah. Obviously, previously at Coinbase, put in a different for different kind of. Vertical. What you think of this almost crazy headline?

Cyril Mathew  45:04  
Yeah, there's a lot there. The particular part I would comment on as long as I've been in space, and I think I mentioned my story came in through the payments angle. I've sort of sometimes looked down, even during the NFT craze. As much as you know, I felt there was some value there. I was always like, man, this seems a little bit like a bubble. One thing that I've noticed, particularly with stablecoins, is that, or or new blockchains, is that sometimes you need this experimental activity, NFTs, meme coins, etc. to create usage on the trades, create liquidity on the chain. Like stablecoins forever are really just a way to settle Bitcoin and other trades, that's how both USDT and USDC grew. And so I've come to like not look down as much, even if I think meme coins aren't my favorite things in the world, is a good way to just almost like discovery on the chain and ways to do things. And I think at least a key part you mentioned, and we were actually I'm in DC for StableCon. We were at a regulator dinner last night. How do we get regulation to move faster, such that at least in theory, a valuable thing like tokenized equities, where much of the world cannot access U.S. equities, which is one of the most valuable safe ways to invest in the world, at least over the last 20 years, and the fact that Robinson has to go to this Lichtenstein sort of route to offer that-that's the part I think I would focus on, which is like consumers are obviously looking for a way to get into these things, and so could we provide even a sandbox environment for Robinhood to do that in the U.S. and really test something that most people I think would agree is valuable is just offering these U.S. equities to the world, and so that's the part I hope that the industry and regulators would take from all of this interesting activity.

Petrit Berisha  46:45  
Matt, thoughts on the interesting activity?

Matt Marcus  46:48  
This is definitely not my area of expertise. So you guys had a lot more here. The only tidbit I'll share is just one of our product managers yesterday told me that a customer asked about adding support for the Robinhood chain, so I just thought I don't know all the details of it, but I just got that in passing. But you know, chose at least like definitely entering the mind space of folks around payments too.

Petrit Berisha  47:11  
And I guess with with the volumes being centered around meme coins right now, those volumes are often super small individually, and those markets are thin, so if you do have like a big payments push by anyone, I mean, those volumes could absolutely dwarf what is going on there now when it starts to look like a a small footprint compared to the rest of of the activity on the chain. But I guess also, you know, same with the prediction market stuff. It's like it's interesting. It's really cool, and everyone is waiting for it to be less sports. But every month it gets more sports, and so like I'd be really interested to see if the same thing happens with Robinhood Chain, where memes are kind of like this early adopter, as Cyril put it, like almost battle testing the infrastructure. And if we look at it 18 months down the line, is it that like meme coins have gone from 90% to 9% of the activity, or have they grown and they're still at 40% even though lots of Matt's customers want to to use it for payments?

Elise Soucie  48:14  
And I think that that's an interesting point about what Cyril was kind of saying as well in terms of the regulation catching up, is because you do sometimes have this interesting problem where yes, we want the regulatory clarity for some of these kind of core aspects, stocks, equities, etc. But also, you don't want regulation to come in too quickly in an area that's going to expire or not really have the staying power in the market. And I think that the way we've seen a lot of regulators approach this is that they have, in early crypto and digital asset regulation, carved out exemptions for DeFi. They've said, let's let that bit of the market evolve, see where we get to, and then maybe we'll come back and regulate it later, and or even carved out whole exemptions for it if it can prove to be truly decentralized. And I think that that at least is my hope. The way that we will see a lot of regulation continue to progress is that where there is a very clear-cut financial services activity, a product, an offering that kind of matches some of those traditional definitions, that maybe we can then apply the regulation quicker, sooner, translate what we had, and adjust it for the nuances needed for the digital assets world, but that, as you say, maybe we just need to kind of let some of these areas grow, see if they'll become less sport, see if they'll become less meme coin, and then bring the regulation in when the market's a little bit more set and settled, and also bigger volumes too.

Petrit Berisha  49:38  
I've got one final question, Sarah. I don't. I don't know what you were going to jump into, but what do you think other chains? If you're in strategy and another chain, and you're looking at Robinhood right now, and you see, I don't know, if you're a Solana and you see someone like Pump Fund thinking about doing stuff there, if you're a cut the the Matt's customer who is maybe rooting flows. Through another chain who is asking for Robinhood support, like what are you thinking right now? Seeing some of these numbers coming out of Robinhood,

Cyril Mathew  50:08  
well, if you're trying to be a general purpose chain, I think you have to be paying attention. There's obviously some chains that have come out recently that are trying to be more focused on payments, and I think they stay in their lane. But Solana, also just shameless plug, another investor of ours. But early on, I know there was this debate. I know Shiraz, who's head of payments there in Maya. Some really great people trying to foster payments on Solana. But I think if they try to turn off meme coin activity or NFTs back in when those were larger, I don't believe Solana would be as big as it was. And so I think one good thing Salon has done is built this ecosystem of different segments of the population that want to do different types of activity, and that's the point of a permissionless chain. Like a lot of people think I've heard some Hunter Biden laptop stuff this past week, which we don't need to go into. But the point is, on a permissionless chain, you you can do these things, and it's not really you know up to any one person's control. And if you're a general purpose chain, you generally want to invite this activity, of course, within the right compliance and all those reasons that anything nefarious is not going on. So that if you're a general purpose chain, I think you have to take a look at how to foster innovation, and sometimes that innovation leads to things that are a little less frowned upon. I think, and so that's how I'd be looking at it.

Petrit Berisha  51:18  
And I did stop you. You got to go drop some gold. I'm sure of it, to to end the show. So please go for it.

Cyril Mathew  51:24  
Well, I was just going to ask you a question back. It's a little bit of a tangent, but given the sports history, and I lived in Europe a lot of London for 10 years, where it was easier to play sports bets for than than it has been in the U.S. I'm curious how prediction markets, if it's changed, who's using prediction markets versus better your traditional sporting betting venues in Europe, or if you've seen behavior change there?

Petrit Berisha  51:48  
Well, look in in the UK we have Betfair Exchange, and Betfair Exchange has been a licensed exchange by the UKGC, the UK Gambling Commission, by from for like almost since I've been alive. So like since the late '90s, early early 2000s, so it is seen as gambling in Europe, right? That is that is kind of pretty clear cut. Whether using an exchange or you're using a sports book, like where you're betting against someone or you're betting against the house, I think the U.S. is a little bit more complicated, right? And I think the you know this kind of the British mind can't comprehend the kind of federal state side by side, and you know where the tax revenues go is a big point. Probably going to end up in Supreme Court if you look at a lot of the volumes that are coming out of Kalshi and Poly Market US and all of these other platforms. Some of the biggest states in terms of volume are states that you cannot gamble in. So, what does that kind of say? Now, I do think there is something interesting here, where like if you are a big bar in New York, like a New York Knicks bar, and they're in the playoffs, and you can hedge them not getting through because if they don't get through the next round, you've lost up to three to four games worth of revenue for your bar. That's pretty interesting, right? If you're a big vendor for events and you know MSG is not going to be used, and you need to hedge that exposure, that is interesting. The annoying and weird thing is like the underlying liquidity is market makers and gamblers, right? And so, how do you regulate that? I think is going to be super interesting to follow. My gut hunch is like you you probably do end up with some form of like state by state prediction market tax, like you have gambling taxes, and the federal oversight is still there, but there is, you know, the states still get their cut. But then, does that mean that you nationalize this thing and let it go? I'm not so sure. And I think in Europe there is a little bit more of a buttoned up approach. But at least I don't know if you saw the FCA have been kind of corralled by some some of the actors to kind of relook at binary contracts. I wonder why that is right, and so you do kind of get into this weird mismatch where, if someone wanted to open up shop in the UK, would they be regulated as a gambling company, or would they be regulated by the FCA if the FCA really look at binary options? So, sorry, Elise, you were going to jump in there.

Elise Soucie  54:18  
All I was going to say is, I personally still think in the UK they'll regulate it as gambling, just because, as you say, of the history of regulation. I could be totally wrong. Prepare to color me shocked, but also I'm not totally sure that the FCA would want to take all of that in under their regulatory umbrella when they're just about to roll out their new crypto regime. So I'll leave it there. But personally, I think of land and gambling in the UK. So yeah, different story in Europe, Cyril.

Cyril Mathew  54:44  
Thanks for that.

Petrit Berisha  54:45  
I have a one story that I'll finish on is I was speaking to a US VC during FinTech NerdCon last year. Plug November this year again for those that will come to San Diego this year, not Miami. They're super sharp, way smart. Other than me, and they were telling me what they think about prediction markets, how they think they're going to be truth-seeking oracles and the future of X and Y and Z, and I was like, but the the volume is mostly sports right now. I don't disagree with what you're saying. The the volumes are mostly sports, and you know, because we've seen from Betfair Exchange and all these other previous exchanges in Europe, X, Y, and Z, and she was like, what are you talking about? And I was like, you know, Betfair Exchange. I had to VPN and show her that this is an exchange that I have regularly used, and loads of customers in the UK have regularly used for the last like 20 years. And her mouth was like gaping. She could not believe that this is a platform that UK customers and European customers have been using for a long time, and not only that, it does $200 billion of volume a year. And so, like, there is also a slight American bubble around prediction markets right now, which I think will burst over the next 18 to 24 months as reality hits about some of the the churn issues that I mentioned, and the CAC in these markets is super, super high, and the the regulation in the US is complex. But it's also very, although it's much more mature in the Europe and the UK, is it's still hard to kind of get things done, and payments are hard in the UK and Europe if you're a gambling company, right? So, so there's all this other stuff that is to be told, and probably to be told by someone much smarter than me. We will definitely end on that note. And sorry, you had to hear my voice so much for that story. Stories we didn't have time for. Nasdaq invests $100 million in Kraken Company Payward at a $21 billion valuation. More interesting raises. Consensus splits MetaMask from institutional and Ethereum infrastructure businesses. Jack Dorsey's block joins a rush for federal bank charters from the OCC, and as Cyril alluded to, Hunter Biden launched a meme coin called Laptop on base. I will not say anything more on that.

Cyril Mathew  56:56  
Great way to end.

Petrit Berisha  56:57  
Thanks so much for listening and for watching. Elise, where can people find out more about you?

Elise Soucie  57:02  
Shameless plug for the podcast that I co-host. You can find the Outside Context wherever you get your podcasts. It's about the future of technology and civilization, or you can find me at Elise Susie Watts on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1  57:16  
Sarah,

Cyril Mathew  57:17  
we're at Latitude. XYZ or on X, we're at RTP, which stands for real-time payments. We'd love to hear from you. It's a good handle,

Petrit Berisha  57:24  
Matt.

Matt Marcus  57:25  
Any to find out how you got the RTP handle. Anyway, my handle is Matchy Marcus, and Modern Treasury is just Modern Treasury.

Petrit Berisha  57:33  
And you can find me at pet Barisha Pet Barisha on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also subscribe to our Prediction Markets newsletter, newsletter.predicted.co, and if you haven't already, subscribe to Tokenized anywhere you get your podcast: Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. And finally, if you did enjoy the show and you want more, leave us a review. It definitely helps other people find the show. And that's all we have for now. We'll be back next week with more tokenized content.