Why 70% of PSPs Still Won’t Touch Crypto

Sy Taylor  0:10  

Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name's Simon Taylor. I'm your host, of course, author at FinTech Brain Food, and head of market dev over at Tempo, and joining me for a stablecoin stories episode at story time once again is Ren Goldie, aka Goldie, the SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks. How you doing, Goldie?

Ran Goldi  0:34  

I'm great. I'm great. I love our story time. I

Sy Taylor  0:37  

do gather round children, for we are doing stablecoin stories. Do you want to remind everybody what it is?

Ran Goldi  0:43  

Yeah. Well, again, you know, you you can read a lot of stories everywhere because the world right now is filled with stories about stablecoins. There's issuers. There's tons of stablecoin use cases. People are waking up to this new reality of stablecoins everywhere. Obviously, if you go to LinkedIn, there's a new story every second. But what we want to tell is the real story behind the projects, behind the people, behind these initiatives that are really driving the industry. And trust me, there are some really interesting stories, and I'm sure people have heard them before. And today, we're going to have our guests tell us the story behind the blockchain that became the payments chain.

Sy Taylor  1:20  

That's a heck of a story indeed. So once upon a time, we had John Egan, Chief Product Officer of Polygon, joining the show. How are you doing, John?

John Egan  1:30  

Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me.

Sy Taylor  1:31  

Thank you for joining us on Stable Coin Stories. Before we jump into your content, your story, I've got to remind everybody that views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. And please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice. Stay safe out there, folks. And of course, this series is made possible by the Story Master himself, Rand Goldie, and Fireblocks. Thank you so much for your support. All right, John, your career arc is pretty unique, pretty interesting. From computer engineer at Purdue to Meta, then serial founder, then Stripe, now Polygon. At Meta, you were building workplace from scratch, an enterprise product inside a consumer company. You founded multiple companies, so help me understand what did you learn about building for institutional users versus consumers on that journey, and what does that founder instinct give you now as a chief product officer that helps you think about things in a in a different way. So building for institutions and founder mode, and how it impacts you throughout your career.

John Egan  2:48  

Yeah, I think. Listen, when we talk to most founders, I imagine you'll find something very similar, which is that you know this kind of uncomfortable habit of living about five years into the future, and it's it's not always good for us, right? Because you can build things way too early, and I think I think if you met with most founders, they would have at least one or two stories for you where they built something that was you know off by three four years. You know, even folks inside of large organizations org leaders kind of have the same experiences at some point or another. They built the right thing. You know, they built it too early, so it's a risk, and it's something you sort of live around in your day to day, and and it draws folks, I think, towards founding and creation because you want to build into that future. You get really excited, you know, about what's coming around the corner. You know, the company we we sold to Facebook was doing high speed data transport simply because it was at a time where doing simple things like moving data between Amazon regions, like if you cross this sort of 3000 mile TCP/IP limit was just bad, and it would just slow down. Movie companies paying for these, you know, multi-gigabit pipes back when those were pretty expensive, and it was cheaper for them to stick a person on an airplane with a hard drive and fly it. You know, Peter Jackson flying hard drives back from New Zealand to the VFX studios every day, just because there was a technology gap. You know, and exactly how you were sort of leaning on those protocols. Ultimately, you could do configurable congestion control. We don't we don't have to get really deep into that. But you know, at at Facebook, you know, what I was really excited about was there had been this kind of shift in the world in the way that humans interacted with each other and with their friends. And at the time, it was a very pure belief inside of the company. We were just connecting people to their friends and the people that they wanted to keep up with and know what was going on in a way that they couldn't in the past. And I actually found and had a theory that that would just translate very directly to enterprise users. You know, you go to work every day and you have the same desire to connect with the people around you, to know what they're up to, to know what's happening in other corners of the organization, and it felt very one-to-one mapped for me. And workplace really grew out of that theory. It grew out of this theory that like there is a social network at work that folks also want to be connected to, and there's an organizational layer on top of that, which at the time at Facebook was groups that we could inject and was already being used, by the way, like. Companies like Lyft and Uber and these sort of like bring your you know whole self to work companies were already doing a lot of their business with their drivers through Facebook, so it made a lot of sense to sort of translate it over. In terms of the big deltas between the two, I think the way that consumers and the way that institutional users understand whether or not software is serving them is a little bit different. I would say, like in the short term, you know, it's both of them. It's an emotional reaction. How do I feel using this thing? How does it seem to be serving me? But then, like medium and long term institutions are much more likely to then want to go and look at the underlying data for like proof of that, right? If you're paying for a service, you know, like workplace, you want to know, and so actually one of the big changes we made for workplace was all of the data and metrics information that became one of the most important and popular surfaces in the product. Which is great. How often, you know, are people across the company reading these company announcement posts? How many groups are being used? How are they being used? What does engagement look like?

John Egan  6:02  

You know, do people get value from this day to day to justify the bill that we're paying? You know, I think consumers just kind of like ride a little bit more of that emotional response to sort of get that continuous validation. But institutional users and you know, Goldie, I'm sure you've seen this at Fireblocks, right? They want to see the data, and and they're actually the more recent kind of corporate organizations that have built like B 2b type companies like Rippling, like actually built data first. I think if you read the history of a company like Ripling, they started with like the data platform for like how would you report on what was happening, and then they built the whole product around that. And so that insight I think is really important and key if you're sort of moving from a consumer-based group that you're building for to an institutional and corporate base, is that sort of surfacing of what maybe the positive emotional reaction is for people using the product actually becomes a large portion of the product and has a lot to do with its stickiness and proof of value.

Ran Goldi  7:00  

And maybe I'll take us more forward on your career because again, you did some fascinating stuff. And by the way, I used Workplace, so it was it was a great product. Now it was closed already, but it was a great product. And later on, obviously, you were you were at Stripe, right? And and Stripe is probably one of the companies that are pushing the limits of what you can do right now around crypto and digital asset, which is great. And you were the head of crypto at Stripe during arguably the most consequential two years of the company. You know, you were there during the the bridge era, and later on when Privy joined and and Tempo was, I guess, being created in the background, like how much of that really shaped your crypto views? Again, it's not that important to talk about Stripe itself. Everyone can read about Stripe if they want to, but like talking about you personally, how much was being there in you know one of the largest payment companies out there have shaped your views both on payments and how payments should actually be in crypto and in digital assets. The utility, the real use case that we were all waiting for.

John Egan  8:08  

Yeah, I had really strong views coming into Stripe about like where I thought utility would come from from a crypto standpoint. You can you can kind of look at my career. I'm a utility guy. I like tools. I like things that help people's lives be easier. I like connectivity, whether that's employees being connected or data moving, you know, or or in the case of blockchain, money moving around. And when I went to Stripe, my theory very much was that the utility on blockchain was was if anything just being wildly underutilized. You know, I'd seen the beginnings of it with with NFTs, I built a company that was doing kind of NFT artwork, and it was really powerful as like an underlying utility for transporting like records of ownership, and that was really cool, really fun, like consumer side. But in my mind, it was so clear that like that utility should be used for money. The joke we always make is like, who would have thought the you know the the killer use case for crypto was was money, right? It's like, but I think it was very clear to me that that was coming, and I wasn't quite sure how it was coming. I just knew it was coming, and you know Stripe was very well positioned at the time to be the kind of delivery mechanism for that utility. That was my theory on the way in. It was like this this was the company you know that I'd used in my startups to build payments, and when I was doing that, you know I had a bunch of friends who were who were also integrating who had kind of crypto needs, especially the OpenSea folks were like good friends of ours out here in in New York, and it just seemed obvious to me that like Stripe should have all of these underlying capabilities. So so when I joined, I was just very practical about it. I was like, "This should clearly be a very native effort inside of Stripe to integrate the utility into the core tools that Stripe already has. And that that doesn't sound like that incredible or unusual of a theory, but it wasn't broadly held. You know, I. In the world, at any at any company at the time, at any PSP, and so you know, joining Stripe and kind of having access to all of those incredible enterprises, you know, and all of those companies that were on the forefront of payments at the time was just a very natural move for me. And did Stripe shape my crypto views? While I was there, I think my views became stronger. So I remember going to ECC in Paris. I want to say it was 2023 or 2024, and I remember this funny thing happened where where no one was really talking about stablecoins on stage, but everyone at the coffee shops was talking about stablecoins, like what was coming with the MiCA license, like who was trying to start minting these things? How are they going to be utilized by businesses, not just you know by kind of people using them to trade NFTs? That narrative shifted really quickly at that moment, and I was at Stripe at the time. I had my Stripe shirt on. It helped me get really close to sort of the community that was having that was experiencing that change, you know. And we brought that back, and that's when we really pulled the acceleration lever for stablecoin integration, and shortly after that was the really exciting moment when John Collison went on stage at Stripe and somewhat unexpectedly put up the "Crypto is back, right banner that everyone sort of remembers. That that was the outcome of sort of that realization, and so I think it was it was very symbiotic. Like I think my strong views about how utility really ought to be impacting the financial sector influenced a lot about the direction that Stripe was building, and sort of Stripe's broader understanding of how payments organizations adopt technologies, you know, and need them integrated in sort of a consistent way, really sort of shaped the way that I thought that could best be delivered to customers.

Sy Taylor  11:41  

I think it's so fascinating that the Mika license was such an eye-opening moment for a lot of people in the crypto industry, but the payments industry sort of took a little while to catch on. You then left Stripe around the same week Tempo launched. So is it something I said? I don't know. No, I'm just kidding. But you missed

Ran Goldi  12:02  

the opportunity to work with Simon on a daily basis. We could have we could have been buddies. We could have been

Sy Taylor  12:06  

hanging out. It would have been fun. But you took one day off and then started a polygon. So like no rest for the wicked. But I'm really curious why you went there based on everything you'd learned to that point, right? Because it felt like payments are taking off, and you need to go capitalize this opportunity. What is it about Polygon and the economic opportunity that really stood out?

John Egan  12:31  

So, as stablecoins started to really take hold, and this happened very quickly, you all were on the front of this as well, so I'm sure you saw it, right? Like we went from a world of we started to talk about stablecoins. Regulatory clarity suddenly seemed like it was around the corner, and then very quickly, like organizations started popping up and moving, like large sums of stablecoins for legitimate organizations. Bridge was one of them, by the way. Right, bridge very rapidly shifted from one type of business, I think that was almost entirely focused on like stablecoin swaps into global money movement. I think that happened very quickly for them, and as that shift occurred, another thing happened in the commercial space, which was historically, if you were a blockchain organization, it was very difficult to have a deep commercial conversation with a large-scale global money mover or commercial entity, you would sort of get like tossed over. Goldie, I bet you've gone through this too, like in in your career and experience. You get sort of tossed to the little like two-person crypto exploratory technology team that has no budget, has no way to actually go and integrate change against the core business, go sit

Ran Goldi  13:41  

with the weird anarchist in the corner who talks about crypto all the time. Yes, that's right. That's right. Maybe we'll move $1,000

John Egan  13:48  

over the system. You know, if you're lucky after six months of fighting. But what happened very quickly is that started to change, and I could see it from my perch. You know, in a world where I previously felt like I could go and talk to enterprise organizations from a standpoint of I'm your trusted partner, you know, let's talk about how you might start to build a crypto strategy. What started to happen is they would come to us having already sat down with the blockchains, and they would come with really strong opinions about what commercial engagements should look like, and what chain they want to use, and what they think the liquidity depth globally is going to be. That's going to help make them get a corridor to work. And anyway, underneath all of this, you know, my sort of five-year alarm. This is kind of back to that that founder side started to go off. It was like things are changing, right? Things are changing where these natively global businesses, which are the blockchains, are starting to get an early seat at the table at these large enterprises and institutions, thanks to having gone through many years of sort of being the the trusted advisor, even if it was just to the little anarchist. In the corner, and when that started to happen, I got really excited because I always wanted to be all in on this. Right, my my goal has always been how do I get deeply involved, 100% in global money movement via blockchain rails, and so the minute I got the sense that that might start to be the right delivery mechanism, it was clear to me to go and work for a blockchain that had those relationships. And you know, I won't bring you on the entire story, but Polygon was already doing something like 80% of Stripe's flows, and that was without too much of a formal relationship. That was just sort of natural money movement. You know, stablecoins were doing like 50-5% of stablecoin movement was happening in like Latin America, and like 70-5% of that was Polygon, and it was clear Latin America was going to be an early mover here. And then I got to know Mark and Sandeep really well, you know, in his journey, and it's obvious move for me personally in terms of getting ahead of the market and building where I think it's going. And Polygon was all in on payments. You know, they told me their story of you know how Polygon started as an Ethereum scaling layer. You know, it's kind of entire journey through NFTs, its commercial relationships, and what I would argue is one of the best BD organizations in the business. And when I looked at this, I saw a product problem, which is great for me because I'm a product guy, right? I was like, the only thing missing here: we have a global settlement network, we have stablecoin adoption. We have commercial relationships. Like all that's missing is the product, the thing that you could bring to the user once you convinced them this was the right thing for them. And so I joined, and that is that's my remit there, and that's how I spend all my time.

Ran Goldi  16:37  

So it's interesting because we talked about how, you know, you you went from from these tech companies into Stripe. Crypto happened in the background. As you said, there was this moment that you know from the anarchists in the corner to suddenly you know within a central place in in a lot of companies, stablecoins became clear. Right, this is the use case. This is the utility. You want to go there. I want to ask you a question that you know might be helpful segue to our next section when we talk about you know the open money stack that you guys built. But when I look today at the top 100 PSPs, and I'm interested to ask you specifically, John, this question because you know you weren't for one of the biggest ones. I'm still seeing that only 30% of them are following. You know what? I don't want to say following footsteps, but like are following the path of owning their own infra. While I still see a lot of PSPs that are using like plug and play type of solution. And again, we talked about they're no longer just doing this because the anarchist in the room is getting to play with this innovation. This is right now coming from boards, coming from CEOs. How do you explain that not 100% of all the PSPs are acting like your former company and are actually owning more of the stack? And maybe we'll get to what your stack you're developing later, but how does how do you explain that?

John Egan  18:03  

Oh boy, I think I think there's so many reasons, right? I mean, we can ignore the innovator's dilemma, which is maybe the obvious reason, which is it's really tough to build the thing that's going to eat the rest of your business, right? Unless you truly believe in it, it's high risk, right? For for a company that's all in, it's not high risk. You bet you've got the company either way. You have to do it. You have to put all your chips on the table. But you know, if you're a legacy money mover of any sort, this isn't just limited to PSPs. It's a bit scary to like rethink the way that you might run your core infrastructure. You know, in a world where the regulatory clarity just arrived, right? I mean, and you can see a pretty big spectrum across these founding teams in terms of you know do they want to live in the world as it stands today do they want to make a bet on where it's going or do they want to make these arms length bets right like okay we'll do a little little bit over here with a partner but we're not really willing to go all in ourselves you know I think Stripe is definitely on on on one end of that spectrum, and I think that that's like going to be the case for a while. You know, I think some are making a bet that like they'll be able to catch up. It's like okay, maybe it's not. It's not like there's not really a land grab here. I think they're wrong, but you know, I think there's a bit of a fear of that.

Ran Goldi  19:14  

100%

John Egan  19:14  

I also think it's important to remember that most PSPs, at least as we talk about them, are primarily domestic organizations, and they're processing credit card transactions for U.S. companies and U.S. citizens. And the opportunity for stablecoin looks much more, at least today, like global money movement. And if you go look at the breakdown of most of these PSPs, of like where their revenues are coming from, where their volumes are coming from. They'll all point to their you know kind of docs page that has all the different companies they quote unquote support. But if you actually look at like the merchant location and the type of transaction that's happening, okay, it's credit card payments and crypto is not. It's not there yet, right? We're like getting there right now. The killer use case is mostly. Cross-border money movement or direct consumer type payments in non-U.S. countries. U.S. like direct consumer payments is incredibly young, and so if you're a PSP and you're sort of looking from a very strict business standpoint, you know you're you're not sure yet, right? You maybe you can't see around that corner. You're probably not actually doing enough global like large-scale money movement to see the wave coming, right? You're doing. You're you're probably more likely to see that if you're a bank, frankly. You know, if you're a large GSEB, you're probably noticing some pressure against your like global Swift type money movement today. But if you're a PSP, you might not be seeing it yet. You might be saying, well, credit card payments are growing every year, and they are right. And we get pretty good margin there, and and and so do the credit card network. So we're just at different stages of the curve. I think of the adoption curve, and to be able to see you know the order of of operations, you have to look to the past, right? Like when did credit cards happen? You know, in relation to like all money movement historically, and we're sort of speed running that entire history, and we're just getting there. I think Mastercard and these guys are just starting to do stablecoin settlement, some really exciting stuff.

Sy Taylor  21:10  

Well, and then on that point, they're doing stablecoin settlement, not stablecoin auths, right? And so those are different parts of the payment stack. That to your point earlier, like it has to have utility, and if I'm not doing cross border, the utility is not obvious. Maybe at some point domestically, with loyalty or AI based settlement and agentic commas, there could be more domestic use cases. But to your point, that they're not really there yet. And also, if my business is growing, why would I focus on it? I think that's a great point. But then there's the just the hey, this stuff's quite hard to use as well. I mean, you've got businesses like Fireblocks out there trying to make the infrastructure really hard and really secure and really trustworthy. But then there are other pieces to the money stack, and and you launched something that I thought was really fascinating: the open money stack. And it's a modular framework for different wallets, different ramps, different compliance, different routing, different on-chain settlement. So my understanding of this is, I could take the open money stack and not use Polygon at all. I could take the open money stack and have a la carte. I can have the set menu. So, so what's the thinking behind this, and what does that look like for a PSP who's like, actually, you know, I do want to do more cross-border, or I do have clients demanding stablecoins, or what does that look like?

John Egan  22:26  

Yeah, what we heard from users in the market who are trying to adopt stablecoins very consistently. What what I personally heard was that in order to build any of these types of products that take advantage of what stablecoins provide, so take like a remittance product, right? Really obvious cross-border money movement situation. You're ending up integrating multiple vendors for that product to exist, and in fact, you're integrating so many vendors that we've heard from VCs that these remittance companies actually will come to them and they'll say, you know, look, part of my moat is I've been able to cobble together like 13 different vendors to put this product in together in such a way that it feels reliable to my end user. So you think about this from a you've got to be able to ramp the money, you've got to be able to store the money, you've got to be able to swap it if you're like moving between coins or into other currencies. You've got to off-ramp it into the local currencies. If you're holding it, you probably want to generate yield from it, which is you know another relationship. And then across all of this stuff, in most cases, it's regulated. And now you're trying to share the compliance layer across all of those vendors, which is nearly impossible because vendors don't trust each other. You go collect like compliance data for one vendor, and your like vendor B is not going to happily go and rely on it. So it turns out, actually, cobbling this stuff together is really, really difficult. And the same sort of discovery, I think, that companies like Stripe made early on in the non-crypto space, which was the more you can bring this together into a single API for developers, the more value it adds. You really get this one plus one equals three kind of experience, and so the open money stack was this idea that it doesn't make sense to build one piece of the puzzle because what the market is demanding today is a full stack solution, and I think founders are noticing this. By the way, if you go look at the acquisitions that are happening, I think founders have figured out it's go full stack or go home. Like if you're not prepared to go and build the entirety of the ecosystem required to solve problems for these startups and large scale organizations, you better go sell. You know, you better go like find a full stack provider now to acquire you, who can build towards that future. And part of that stack has to be the chain, right? Like I think this is something we overlook because even if you go and get everything else, then you still have to go figure out what chain to operate on. And in the old days, the way you do that is you go get checks from the chains.

Ran Goldi  24:54  

I think you're 100 right, and I think this vertical vertical integration is what we're seeing. And more right now across our entire space. Obviously, you know Simon's here, so we're preaching to the choir in a way. But I think you're absolutely right. I think a lot of founders, as you said, especially in the last 12 months, have sort of realized that they're toast because the market has changed, and this is no longer a market where a client or whatever enterprise comes in and says, "You know what? I'm going to

John Egan  25:30  

build my own thing with like this company and this company and this company and this company. They want a stack, right? They want like the open stack maybe that you guys created, or I don't know whatever Coinbase is stacked, Stripe stack whatever Fireblocks is stack like they want solutions right and I think you're 100 right and I think this is what I mean this is why the acquisition of CoinMe makes sense of Sequence makes sense right accelerating your your open money stack yep and I think entirely we have to be able to provide this service in a seamless way, where you don't see any of that stuff happen. Otherwise, it doesn't work, right? Otherwise, there's there's almost no point. And then what's really cool about it is, not only does it go and make it easier for like a traditional startup to integrate, once it's all pulled together, you start being able to do kind of cool stuff, right? Like one shot a neo bank, right? I think one of our Devrel folks like pushed this out the other day. You can use like the Polygon CLI now with the Open Money stack, and you can literally just tell Claude like build me a Neo Bank, and you know, 10 minutes later you've got ramps, you've got storage, you've got swaps, you've got yield, and you know, assuming you have a iOS developer account, you've got it sitting on your phone, and there's two sides of Agentic. We talk about a lot in this space. Like one side is agents kind of replacing humans as the actual transactors, which I think is fascinating. We should really talk a lot about. But there's also just like startups and the way they build is changing aggressively, and the tool stacks they want to integrate are changing because of that, and the more you can kind of integrate a single external vendor for your regulated money movement, like the more powerful you become in front of your cloud code console, and so I think that's really exciting as like a shift.

Ran Goldi  27:15  

No, no, I I totally agree, and and I do want to pick your brain on Gentic in a second, because I do think that right now it's mostly vendors and PR wash, but we'll talk about that in a second. But I want to focus on Polygon for a second because we've talked about the OpenStack. I think that was like a very brave move, very brave move by Polygon. Like hats off for Polygon for that. But I want to talk specifically about the chain because Polygon is different. It's really sort of like the market leader, I think, in in micro transactions. Right, fees are like sub a 10th of a cent. Settlement obviously under five seconds. But Polygon was targeting very different use cases of of micro payments, right? And what they unlock economically for fintechs in you know in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and so forth. And then I think that was sort of like the course to make it into the payments chain. But I think like what is that competitive mode really that makes it that competitive chain? Is it the combination of everything you guys have built so far from the chain perspective and the open stack-is it like other things that you will unveil later on? Like, how do you think about Polygon as the payments chain?

John Egan  28:30  

I think there are so many dimensions that make it the payments chain. It's it's it's part of what really excites me about it. You know, you have this early mover dimension that's really important, which is why Polygon has so much volume in Latin America. Like Polygon was boots on the ground across the world early, early, early in stablecoin money movement and liquidity, and Latin America is like absolutely no exception. And so, you know, when we talk about micro payments, kind of to that point, like I actually think if you look closely at them, I think it's a bit of a misnomer. Like I like to just call them everyday payments. It's just like normal small transactions, like anyone else would make day to day on chain, and those payments I think are more representative of real world type adoption. If you go to like certain countries in in Latin America and you're watching kind of like the transactions that are happening. They're just happening very directly in stablecoins in a way that, like you know, historically with Bitcoin, we really celebrated you know the big moves. We're like, wow, look at that that person who just moved a billion dollars for like five cents, right? And it's really fun and it's a cool headline, right? But the the reality, in my opinion, is the chain that's really going to change the world is the one that gets used for everything without thought. Where if you're going to do a a 1/10 of a penny transaction, it's still worthwhile. And so, come back to sort of that emotional feeling. There's an emotional attachment to Polygon in a lot of the world that that's the scale. Chain that's the fast, easy to use, low cost EVM Ethereum aligned chain, and I think that that's served us really well. Just kind of getting out of the gate into this space early on. You know, outside of that, I think just the technology scaling layer has made just huge progress over the last you know maybe six to nine months. You know the move to like 5000 or so transactions per second. You're getting up there with credit cards. You know I think Visa or Mastercard does like somewhere between five and 10, depending on the on the weekend, depending on sort of how you measure it. You know under certain measurements it's more like 2500 So we're already past it. But like scaling up to that point, there are no reorgs anymore. We haven't had a reorg since January. The core technology has to be rock solid to the point where you don't question it. It's like when you adopt AWS, you don't you know that underlying infrastructure is capable, right, of keeping up of working, and your proof point of that is Amazon.com. The fact that I can go to Amazon.com every day tells me that these folks are good at it. I think Polygon historically has sort of had that proof through Polymarket. It's like this large-scale, rapidly growing unicorn organization, right? Is on Polygon, and like there've been bumps along the way. It's you know they've grown really fast. They're a classic unicorn, but at the same time we've kept up, right? And Polygon doesn't fall over, and Polygon scales at the speed of the fastest growing consumer-facing applications, and that won't change. And it's hard to reestablish that. You know, if you don't have that historically, it's tough to kind of build it from zero because everyone's out there making the same promises. You know, everyone's out there saying we can scale infinitely. You know we have, but but Polygon's got the receipts, and so I think that like that and kind of a core focus on becoming a payments chain and being very public about it. You know you say this is this is a bold move, which I really appreciate because it is. It's a huge bet on the future, and it's it's very much calling our shot in a way that I think a lot of organizations are a bit afraid to do, and so those things come together very practically to make the chain continue to grow. You know, if you actually look at like total stablecoin volume, I believe we're number one as of as of May.

John Egan  32:12  

I'll have to go pull like the new numbers, but like you can always cut this a bunch of different ways: wash trading, no wash trading, you know, real real volume. You know, but Polygon, like by far, you know, is at the very top of this list of stablecoin money movers. And then on the agentic front, which matters a lot to me personally, we're also number one. So we're part of the x4 102 foundation. We've been number one on those charts for months now since we started going deeper into it. All agentic transactions are free on Polygon. Our job is to be number one, easy to use, easy to access and a clear choice to the point where it's obvious, just like Amazon and AWS is obvious.

Sy Taylor  32:48  

Yeah, there's power in defaults and there's power in brand recognition. To your point and the metaphor there, I do have to take a quick pause here while we hear from our sponsors. 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. Tokenized is also 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. Thank you so much to our sponsors for making this show happen and for letting us have a little bit of story time with John himself. I think the thesis here, John, you've been outlining, is really interesting, which is if all money moves on chain within a decade, even the 50th best chain kind of ends up winning big. That's a a confident framing that you see this category as more than one horse in the race. But do you actually believe that this category itself is inevitable, or is there a scenario where Swift and RTP absorb some of those stablecoin use cases and stable? Was just like a a forerunner. Like, do you remember when we had DVDs? Do you remember there was this period of time where we had the the the technology that came before everything else?

Ran Goldi  35:10  

Laser disc. What happened to laser disc? I love that. That was great quality.

Sy Taylor  35:14  

It really was, and they were they were the size of like a house, bigger than yeah, bigger than your head and a disc. Great era for like

John Egan  35:21  

album art, right? You have this like large. We've lost that for sure with the MP3 generation.

Sy Taylor  35:31  

You know, but to MP3s, you know, stablecoins, Napster, and we're waiting for iTunes here. Like the banks are talking up a good game about tokenized deposits. We've seen TCH launch a tokenized deposit network, Zelle, not to be underestimated, launching their own initiative for cross-border stablecoins. Do you see those as like proof points that stablecoins winning, or that like actually there's a bigger picture here?

John Egan  35:55  

So I mean, lots to unpack in that set of questions, but but maybe zooming out a little bit, the idea that like you know all of the kind of incumbent technologies will either catch up or make this new technology irrelevant, I think has a pretty long history of of being disproven. We can point to Uber and the disruption of the taxi cab industry, and you could kind of argue throughout the entire history of that organization's growth-that surely the like incumbent and well-adopted and existing industry will simply rapidly adopt app-based ride-hailing and all of the conveniences that come with it, and make Uber irrelevant. It didn't happen, and it didn't happen for all of the sort of standard innovators' dilemma reasons. It's hard to make that change. Incumbents are making money off of the friction that they currently provide, and that change always happens in a way where there's parts of the market that the incumbents are blind to, that actually cause a large portion of the shift. Right. One of the cool things that Uber did is it didn't just take ridership away from taxicabs, it introduced an entirely new category of rider that wasn't previously using taxis at all, and I think stablecoins are doing the same. It's not necessarily about taking the volume, you know, away from Swift, right? It's about there are new use cases, corridors, and types of money movement that didn't exist before that can now, and we would expect an absolute avalanche of startups that move money in ways that they historically didn't. I think often about all the apps on my phone that would benefit from some kind of value storage inside of them. Every game I play every everything I have where I'm like kind of assign value to a number inside of the application, but I can't extract it. Right, every one of those is an opportunity to be a stablecoin and to be stored as a stablecoin and to interact back with the the world. And it could still involve credit cards, right? Like just just because stablecoins win doesn't mean that the consumer merchant relationship of tapping a credit card goes away tomorrow, right? The entire back end system can be optimized and better integrated, and then that credit card can stick around for an awfully long time. And I think that's that's one of the advantages.

Ran Goldi  38:17  

Are you insinuating you're going to acquire a rain light company, John. Is that what you're doing here?

John Egan  38:23  

I I can make no comments on on unplanned. I I am excited about all of the different ways you can off ramp. I think off ramping is is one of the hardest problems, right? In in crypto today, and off ramping isn't really about getting into dollars. Off ramping is giving the stablecoins real-world utility, right? And the the challenge there is multi-fold. One is the merchant who I'm spending with expects dollars, so it's kind of an off-ramping problem. And you can solve that one of two ways: you can solve it with cards and translate an off-ramp into dollars, or you can solve it by solving the merchant's problem and just allowing them to receive in stablecoins and store those stablecoins and get the same value as they get with dollars. So I think that's what's exciting about the sea change is the proof of disruption to me is you can put any lens on it you want. It doesn't only work through a certain lens. It doesn't require credit cards to disappear and Swift to disappear and even ACH and wire to disappear. It doesn't require that. There's a version of the world we'll iterate through, where all of those things play together, and you still get unusual step function value in the value system in a way that enables everyone from application builders to treasury managers at companies, and so I think that's like what's exciting to me.

Ran Goldi  39:47  

You talked about with excitement on Agentic, and I'm gonna be devil's advocate. And and again, I love Agentic. Look, I'm a I'm a tech guy. I've been programming since I was nine. I'm an optimistic about technology. Fireblocks have joined the X42 Foundation as well. We're there, but convince me it's not just AI watching for now and vendors doing pilots and no one is actually using it. And I know I know that Polygon. This is why I'm asking you because I know that Polygon is the leading chain of agentic transactions. So I just I want you to tell the people who are watching us or listening, like what are those transactions? Tell me why this is actually happening.

John Egan  40:31  

So so I'm first of all, Goldie, I'm not going to stand here and say that like agentic volume on chain is skyrocketing. You can go pull the numbers. These are small numbers today, right? Right now, agentic transactions on chain is entirely exploratory developer work, right? It's entirely on this idea that I can play with it, and it's interesting for you know small scale micro payments. You know, we've done some work with like Dune at one point, right? For like paying for data, but this is super young, right? And it's super young, and it's young because AI is young. We talk about autonomous agents like they're in our daily lives, and they're not. Most people's experience with agents are through a SaaS service. You know, they're they're they're interacting with ChatGPT, which on the back end, has these kind of synchronous agent-like relationships, and payments in those experiences actually work decently well through traditional methods because there's a human in the loop, right? It's it's not crazy for a ChatGPT message to write back to me and say, "Click this Amazon link and check out. It's not like that frictionful of an experience for me, the shift that we're all getting ready for is you know we started to see it with Open Claw, like very early beginnings of people starting to create these sort of standalone autonomous agents, and those agents don't get to do that. They don't get to say, "Hey, human, come over here and take an action. Right? They need to be able to go and take actions themselves with some sort of treasury or available capital, and so we're not there yet. And it's not because the stablecoin technology isn't there. Like we are building for that future. It's frankly because AI isn't there yet, and it's still it's still just it's like SaaS services. I don't know how else to describe it, right? And as long as AI feels like a SaaS service, then this idea of billions of AIs interacting with each other and making micro payments simply doesn't exist.

Sy Taylor  42:33  

But that's starting to change with some of the open weight models now, and GLM 5.2 and getting closer to the frontier. The rise of on-prem AI and people starting to do stuff-you know-it's MacBook Studios and Mac Studios are completely sold out. You cannot buy them anywhere, and that's just the hobbyists. That's not sort of what Apple's going to do on the iPhones and on device in 12 months' time with new Apple Silicon. So I think I buy your argument, John. I think I think I'm swung round a little bit. I'm I'm gonna play Arbiter here between you and Goldie. I'm gonna be like I'm gonna be in the middle somewhere. The the the lover, not the fighter. You know what I mean? But like I I think this is so interesting as a point in time because AI has this annoying habit of being like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing sasspocalypse and you don't want to be on the wrong side of that, and it's intellectually honest to say we're currently not in that shift. It has not yet happened, but we are preparing ourselves for the day when we believe it eventually will, and that's possibly the most intellectually honest argument on the debate I can possibly imagine. But we're closing out on time. Goldie, can I ask the question you always ask the guests, or are you going to? Yeah, go

Ran Goldi  43:44  

ahead. Go ahead. All

Sy Taylor  43:45  

right, I'm I'm playing Goldie for a day. This is fun. So, 20 years from now, John, are stablecoins just a story, or are they a fact?

John Egan  43:56  

20 years from now, I think they're a fact, and not only are they a fact, but there's so much a fact that they're invisible. Like I think the fact that we call them stable coins today, instead of just calling them money, is very indicative of where we are in sort of the adoption curve of these things. Right? In 20 years, it's just money, and the financial services and institutions and rails companies today that we call blockchain oriented will just be the financial infrastructure, institutional, you know, and money moving organizations of the future, and that I feel very confident in.

Sy Taylor  44:42  

So fascinating, great answer. And I think stablecoins become invisible. We stop using that word, but you know, look, movies still exist, but DVDs don't. Like we still have the the medium. We don't think about, hey, I'm using cloud and I'm using AWS when I'm watching Netflix. The the. Technology becomes invisible if it truly succeeds. I think it's such a great point to leave it. So I want to thank you so much, John, for joining us in this week's story time. And if people want to learn more about you, John, or Polygon, or the Open Money Stack, where do they go to do that?

John Egan  45:15  

They should come to Polygon technology, and if you want to sign up for early access to the Open Money Stack. We've got a contact link in there, and if you just want to learn more, there's a docs link, and you can even explore the API and see all the capabilities.

Sy Taylor  45:28  

Heck yeah, Goldie, how about you?

Ran Goldi  45:30  

I'm at Rangoldy on X and Rangoldy on LinkedIn as well. Come and find us or Fireblocks HQ on X and on LinkedIn.

Sy Taylor  45:38  

You'll find me at Sy Taylor on all of the socials, screaming into the void at fintechbrainfood.com, and of course over at tempo.xyz. And it would mean a lot if you would help other people find this show too. If you've enjoyed this conversation nearly as much as I have, why not hit that subscribe button? It's like under your finger. You can hit it right now and leave us a review. Genuinely, it's the best way to say thank you for a podcast. Is leave us a review. It really does help with the discovery, and it would mean a lot if you did. Thank you so so much, and we'll catch you next time.