Why Every Bank Needs 24/7 Cash Settlement Now

Sy Taylor  0:10  

Welcome to Tokenized. My name is Simon Taylor, and this is the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. I am your host for today, author at FinTech Brain Food and head of Market Dev at Tempo, and I'm joined as always by my friend, my co-host for this stablecoin story series. It's story time once again. It's Rang Goldie, SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks. How you doing, Goldie?

Ran Goldi  0:35  

I am great. Happy to be here again for another exciting story, and and this one is-I think this one will surprise a lot of our listeners and viewers.

Sy Taylor  0:44  

It will just remind everybody what story time is all about.

Ran Goldi  0:48  

Well, as everyone knows, and if you're listening to our podcast here, then you definitely know that the world is now filled with stablecoins. There's issuers. There's more and more use cases. There's more-I would say-consortiums and non-consortiums popping up every day, as you've seen in our last episodes. There's a lot of tectonic shifts, but people want to know what's happening behind the stories that you read on PR, behind what you're reading in LinkedIn, right? And today we're going to talk about the story of one of the world's largest and probably most important bank for payments, and the bank is is moving into digital asset, and that of course is Citibank. Simon, if you want to present our guest,

Sy Taylor  1:28  

yeah, welcome to the show, Ryan Rugg, who is global head of digital assets for Citi Token Services. How are you doing, Ryan?

Ryan Rugg  1:34  

Great, Simon. Thanks for having

Sy Taylor  1:36  

me. Good stuff. Thank you. Well, thank you for being with us. You got one heck of a story. Before we get to that story, I've got to remind viewers and listeners that views of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice. And reminder number two is this series is brought to you and made possible by our friends at Fireblocks. All right, for those who don't know, I'd love for you to just walk through your career a little bit, Ryan. JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Then you ended up working in digital assets with IBM and r3. Now at Citi, is this all Richard Kendall Brown's fault? Like, what happens in this story?

Ran Goldi  2:17  

And does your family know that you went from being like an executive director at J.P. Morgan into our space of blockchain. Tell us the truth.

Ryan Rugg  2:28  

I'm pretty sure my family still thinks I'm like a stockbroker, which I never was. I just happened to work in markets. My mom's like, "Oh, she's a stockbroker. I'm like, "I'm not a stockbroker. But you know, it's been it's really interesting. Like, you know, so I was a computer science finance major. I started my career out in tech, but you know, you're 21 years old. You walk into these large institutes. I thought I was gonna, you know, rewire, you know, a bank, and I was doing like V lookups on spreadsheets, and I was like, this is so boring. So I worked my way to the front office and worked in cap markets for 10 years, and and I loved it. You know, I was doing really innovative structures for clients, but then post crisis, you know, after Dodd Frank and a lot of those innovative structures you couldn't do for clients. So I went back to my roots. I started taking you know Python classes because I had done C plus plus in college, and it was really fascinating. I was like, I read an article about blockchain in 2015. I was meeting colleagues who had you know made the jump over into various different entities, and I was fascinated. I'm like, if this technology was around when I started my career, it could completely reinvent all the financial plumbing. So then I went down the rabbit hole. I was meeting with you know at the time r3 and just more exploratory to understand the technology and what it was, and they offered me a job, and it was one of those things that I looked around. I didn't want my boss's boss's job. I had been, you know, in cap markets for quite some time, and if I didn't make this career pivot, I probably never would. So went to work for r3, was employee number 20. Like loved it. It was a consortium at the time. We were 65 different banks trying to solve a lot of different issues within using blockchain technology, similar to what's happening now. If you think about all the different consortiums that are coming out, so you know we went from 20 to 450 employees. I got to do everything from help raise 117 million Series A to literally sweeping the floors. You know, at at a at a startup, you kind of do it all, but really, where I struggled was like the implementation and scaling of this technology. So you know, IBM approached me about coming to run their blockchain practice for Americas, and like where I was struggling, you know, I had 100 scrum masters. We were a global team. We had risk compliance, the cloud, all the different facets that where we were kind of, I would say, struggling to like really implement and scale. So went to work there, and it was great. And then that part, I was pitching Citi to hire IBM, and they're like, "Why don't you come run digital assets for us? And you know, I kind of took a pause. I mean, I thought I'd worked for a fintech startup. I had just done a SPAC at that time. I'd worked for a large global system integrator, but I had never been in the seat myself. I'd never been actually in the seat building this technology from the ground up, and that's kind of you know what brought me here and brought City Token Service. I really wanted to understand like how these banks like implement and scale technology that could make very impactful, I would say, progress for them. So that's a nutshell what I've been up to the last decade in this space, which is I guess makes me one of the OG in here.

Ran Goldi  5:26  

I think that that's fascinating, especially because, as you said, I mean, r3 is was still is a creation hub in a way, and IBM is sort of like an implementation hub, and I think it's it's very different roles. Like in one you ideate, and the second you actually meet the clients and see what's their pain. I wonder before we move on, just like what did you learn at IBM about all the pains clients are having while they're looking at digital assets, all their skepticism. Like like what did you take from there about your view on digital assets,

Ryan Rugg  6:02  

yeah, it was so. IBM had acquired a company called Promatory, which was all XOCC, FDIC, SEC. So, really, I would say the focus on the importance of risk compliance governance was really brought to light for me there. And like you know, at the time, Julie and the team had wrote the speedy agreement for State of Wyoming, which was probably the first legislative piece within digital assets, they had gotten Anchorage or Bit license. We are working with several other companies who now have stablecoins out there about their launch. We are working with the large exchanges on implementing the importance of transaction due daily monitoring. Like so, it was a really interesting journey in that, and a lot of the things that I had learned there, I brought here with me. You know about the risk, the compliance, the safety, the soundness, about how you implement it at scale, how you make sure you know from a client side, like the implementation has to be seamless. So a lot of the even like the architectural decisions we made when designing City Token Service, like we often skate the complexity of a blockchain, right? Where clients use an API or a dropdown box to be able to move money globally, and that was by design. I had the benefit of sitting at IBM and implementing for other banks, right, and seeing how their architecture was, and understand what worked and what didn't work, and what was going to scale. So coming here, making some clear decisions pretty early on about like even as little as like you don't even have to open a new account to use City Token Service. It's part of like your larger agreement. We we enable it in the background. Like I believe this technology will be successful when we're not sitting here talking about the technology. Just how we don't talk about cloud. And are you on prem? Are you you know cloud? Like that's what makes this technology successful.

Sy Taylor  7:38  

I think that's such a great point. People forget that compliance is this complete iceberg. You know, like if you're outside of a bank, compliance sounds like you know BSA and AML and a bunch of buzzwords, and you got to do KYC and due diligence. But when you're on the inside, it's teams and it's audits, and 50% of it at least is just the record keeping and making sure people are trained. There's so much that goes into it, so much hidden pain, and then that's just for the bank. What about their customer? How are they going to sell this product to their customer? And if you can just make that turnkey, that's a completely different conversation. So, like you were sort of alluding there to when you came in, you sort of did a lot of stuff. So, give me the 30,000 foot view. What is the digital asset strategy today at Citibank?

Ryan Rugg  8:25  

I wish it was me. Like there is a massive team behind like Citi Token Service and all that we did, and it's been incredible working with the team here at Citi. And like the strategy, I would say overall, the first use case that we went after was liquidity management. We had surveyed our top clients about what was their real pain point. Is you know they want to be able to move money regardless. It's weekends, holidays. If it's Fourth of July, doesn't make a difference. They want to be able to move money globally. So that's really where we started. And you know we're live in five branches with two currencies. Where if it's Saturday, Sunday, Friday, 5p.m. and it's five a.m. in Singapore. Clients can now move money, and you're starting to see the I would say the different use cases and applicability. We thought liquidity management, but now we have like a broker dealer who's using it when it's like you know Chinese New Year in China and like you know in um Singapore and the banks close, they can now move money to the U.S. to buy bonds, equities, and margin calls. So the strategy overall though is build by partner. So City Token Service is an example of what we've been building the last couple years, but we also, you know, we've partner, you know, an example of what we're doing with Coinbase base out there to be able to do pay-ins and payouts with stablecoins. We also, when I say buy, invest, you know, we invested in Finality, we invest in BBNK, and we'll continue with that strategy. And again, we're just viewing this as another set of rails that, if and when our clients want to use it, they're able to use it. But it has to be fully backward compatible, interoperable with traditional assets and cash to be scalable. Our eyes.

Ran Goldi  9:58  

So when you joined Citi. Back in 22, it was already moving $4 trillion a day on traditional rails. Right, that's like one of the largest payment flows on Earth. Again, extraordinary baseline to be building from. But what was the mandate for digital asset as you came in? Like, what was the internal conversation like? Was there already a clear strategy around you know tokenized deposits and versus stablecoins or was still being contemplated?

Ryan Rugg  10:29  

I mean, Citi has been within digital assets for over decades, so they had been you know investing this technology and setting up the various teams for quite some time prior to me joining. So there was a really good foundation from you know I would say people working at the firm prior obviously with this new administration coming in is really what gave digital assets more I would say like some light right where we had been working behind the scenes for a decade as mentioned it just wasn't kind of brought to the forefront but recognizing that we're at this I would say, point in time, right, where it's not just blockchain. You're seeing AI, you're seeing quantum, you're seeing all these different technologies really come together to change the way that not just financial services, all industries are based. So I think that you know a combination of the foundations the team have been laying for the last decade to you know what is going on from a regulatory legislative standpoint had brought more sunlight onto what Citi was doing, but it wasn't necessarily new. Like you know, it takes decades and years to build this technology. I mean, to really truly scale it, like we're fully embedded into our traditional solutions by design. As I mentioned, like I want our clients to have a seamless experience, like logging onto City Direct, which is our UI. You're able to choose a drop-down box, Citi Token Service, or any other type of payment rail, and that's it. And we'll mint the token in one branch, we'll send it to another, we'll burn it. Is cash for cash in your account, so your reporting, your end of day, is synonymous to what they know today. Do I think that potentially could change in the future where clients want to hold wallets and manage keys and yeah, host notes. Yeah, but that was not my experience at IBM. Clients were not at that maturity level to be able to do that, run that infrastructure themselves.

Sy Taylor  12:12  

Yeah, I don't know if everybody's fully ready for Tony McLaughlin's vision yet of being you know everybody will run run wallets, but I do think it's a compelling vision, right? You could imagine that instead of having 30 different accounts with each bank, I have one wallet and and I can move it 24/7. But the first thing is actually all of my reporting as a big corporate client has to continue to work. And if I can just have that 24/7 thing in multiple currencies, that would be really really nice. I'm curious, like when did you? So we mentioned the new administration. We've obviously seen the passage of the Genius Act. Where did stablecoins become a focus, and and sort of how much of your time is spent on that versus token services? And talk to me about the portfolio of clients that are asking about it versus, I guess, my assumption would be the larger book that just wants 24/7 cross border. What does that look like for you today?

Ryan Rugg  13:05  

Yeah, absolutely. So I, you know, we have hundreds of clients on City Token Service, but the majority of them are still using it if they misforecast, if they have like unexpected payment, like for M and A activity. It's not the traditional because Treasury management systems are not set up for all clients for real time, so take tokens out like they're not set up for real time kind of management of cash and assets. But we do have some like large e-commerce platforms on that are you know selling goods all day long, sending money back to Asia. We do have some PNI companies using it real time, but I would still say the majority is not a heavy user, and like when I think of tokenized deposits, when I think of stable coins, it's just another payment rail. Like again, we're going to provide both to our clients to enable it, and any enterprises that do, for the most part, take in stables, convert it back to fiat immediately. I've seen very few clients holding it on their balance sheet right now, and it's just because their infrastructure is not set up for it on their side currently.

Ran Goldi  14:06  

And talking specifically about clients, like you ran this pilot with ships in a canal ecosystem, letters of credit, fuel payments, smart contracts triggering automatically when fuel was received. That that was a very concrete image of like what programmable money might look like in the real world. Can you walk us through what happened there and what's the story there? Because I think that's like one of the most compelling examples of how programmable money could be used.

Ryan Rugg  14:33  

Yeah, absolutely. And like we're really focused on solving client pain points. So you know, a large shipping company and a canal came to us with this pain point of not being able to move ships through a canal like off hours unless they had letters or credit. But you know, then you're constructed to like the banking hours. So we took our tokenized deposit and made it, as you said, programmable with smart contracts. Like if this happens, then do that. In this case, it was if the ship received fuel. Automatically release the funds. You know, trade has been notorious for being paper and like slow, automating that whole entire process just to ease the pain points and the you know latency within the system. So the programmability aspect of this technology is really powerful, right? It's the mule record, programmability, 24/7 nature of it. So I think those types of use cases will continue to evolve as we kind of start to see more client adoption across the ecosystem. I

Ran Goldi  15:29  

think that over the last probably like two three years, we we've seen a lot where stablecoins have got to into like you know various verticals, and I think that the B 2b commodity trading space was the most receptive one, and not a lot of people know this. But even today, some companies like even Tether, for example, are actually working with a lot of those trade companies, and in essence, providing them credit sometimes, or just helping them do the movement of funds because again, it's those companies. Correct me if I'm wrong, Ryan. That really need to move money as fast as they can, so they could actually release their cargo. Obviously, right? Like you mentioned, and because otherwise, their business their business really depends on the speed of money movement. Did you feel that as well from these types of clients?

Ryan Rugg  16:19  

It's really interesting, and like you know talking about like trade overall like you know that was the first one of the first use cases we worked for you know back a decade ago at r3 and we had Contour where we had We Trade we had there's so many of these different trade consortiums that I've lived through and seen evolve and ultimately fail for multiple different reasons you know there was the ownership of it, you know, where one shipping company had a large percentage of the ownership, where the other ones, even with Shaw 256, didn't feel comfortable putting all their data out there, right? They were like, "There's not. Then I think back to the contour, and there was other problems that were out there: the ownership model, non for profit versus profit. There was, you know, worries about the data. There was it was multiple different constructs. It is a huge pain point in the industry, and I think it's still ripe for disruption. But even like wet signatures pre COVID, that was a requirement. So regardless how innovative this technology is and programmable and solving paying multiple different entities at once, if it still requires you to go back to a wet signature, it's not really adding that much efficiency. And there's been multiple changes in law and legislation that we've seen. But it was-it's been an interesting journey in that space.

Sy Taylor  17:25  

It's super interesting. I was, for my sins, involved in some of those as well in a past life, Ryan. And if you've never worked in trade finance, it is astonishing how much paper there is. I saw one study that I think my Alamancea Barclays did that estimated that if you could just remove the paper, you'd save around 40 billion a year from the industry just in paper DHL costs. Like it's insane. There were entire floors of the building I worked in that were just like big crank filing cabinets for the paper. So it is the problem space that's huge, but it's a network effects problem, so kind of interesting. Tether has got this bottom-up adoption, but it's obviously the large banks that have the largest commodities providers in the world, and they'll be looking to you guys for help. You've also said, been quite direct that nobody wants just a citi token necessarily. Your clients manage hundreds, sometimes 1000s of bank accounts globally. Dare I say it? Not always just with Citi, right? Like for the complex ones. So they need a multi-bank, multi-asset, multi-border connectivity. How important to you is things like interoperability, and how do you think about partners who think about that problem too?

Ryan Rugg  18:39  

Yeah, it's it's really important. Like I've definitely been vocal. Like we wouldn't have needed a blockchain if we weren't intending to connect externally and have kind of a multi-bank strategy, right? And we're part of several of these different consortiums out there to understand how interoperability works. We're also connecting into internal solutions, so we're a corresponding bank for 1500 different banks. Of that, 300 plus are on a solution called 24/7 USD clearing. So they have 24/7 USD clearing. So we're integrating City Token Service into that to now give our clients access to 300 plus banks. But we're not stopping there. We're working with several of these consortiums, as I mentioned, to help design and build for interoperability for the future. Like clients do want multi bank, and I we recognize that, right? They have hundreds, if not 1000s, of bank accounts. How do they have one purview of what their current treasury position is across globally across all banks? And like, how do we work towards that? Also, like multi asset, like this technology allows you to go from cash into assets, DVP atomic settlement instantly. How do we provide interoperability with traditional assets and new assets, but across a global ecosystem? So working with several entities on that as well. But I will say, like Simon, it's definitely a focus of ours, and there's several companies out there developing different standards, different you know, and it's very reminiscent. Of to what we tried to do at r3 back in 2016 17 with different banks, different entity standards, global networks, bringing all the entities together. So I definitely probably more war wounds on what not to do than to do with these, but definitely have a lot of experience and continue to focus on that multi network aspect of it.

Ran Goldi  20:18  

But I really want to poke on this because I think that again, I've been in the space for probably about 10 years in the blockchain space. I've seen a lot of groups of companies come together and say, "Oh, from now on, here's a new standard, or here's a new token of sorts, or whatever. And I can say a lot of those have played out well. And I'm not trying to say anything about the recent ones. I think you know everything that came out over the last several weeks is pretty much amazing. But I want to ask you, Ryan, because you've seen this happen around money movement about new rails that came to be. Do you have like a theory of how would a good solution for all this fragmentation could look like?

Ryan Rugg  21:00  

Yeah, I have a joke. I'm like, I've seen this movie and I know how it ends, but like, you know, because it's it's played out so many different ways, and I can tell you the structures that have failed in the past. Like, you know, I mentioned where it was one entity that had a large ownership of it; others did not feel comfortable joining. Right, like it has to be built for the industry by the industry. Like, citi could never own the network. Like our peers would not join that, and we fully recognize that, right? We can contribute to the standards, we contribute to the openness, we can contribute, but we can't own the network, and like that has to be the same here. So it's like you've seen like the for profit versus non for profit. I watched that kind of evolve within like even going back to insurance with b3 I versus kind of what the institute was doing, where one was built by the industry, where one was for profit, and like who was included, who was not included. So it's really interesting now to watch how these different entities are taking slightly different approaches, but in general trying to develop standards. I would say that some of the mistakes that we made at r3 Corda Network, for instance, where we had multiple different versions of Corda, because we could not get all the banks to do outage at the exact same time to push out updates at the next like you know rollout, we ended up not having backward compatibility because people were running on different versions of Quarto, so it's like it became really, really difficult to manage, and like that whole interoperability that we were building for wasn't there, right? And then like certain versions weren't even like able to be compatible with the the new version, so it is definitely a challenging area to develop and definitely needed. Like the amount of networks I get approached by, and I can imagine others out there. It's like definitely the name of the game right now. I joke. I'm like, if we had $1 for every network approached us, I'm like, we could retire, because there's so many different. But it's such a key part of this technology, and it's going to be really scalable. But like again, going back to ones that are built for the industry by the industry, we've seen time after time. If it's Swift, is it TCH? Is like these are the ones that truly scale in this space, right? So it'll be interesting to see how this evolves.

Sy Taylor  23:09  

Yeah, there was a lot of negativity around certain large consortia in the recent press for some of their own self-inflicted reasons, frankly. But it did exactly the same thing in my newsletter. I said, "What about early warning services? Zelle is the most popular and most used peer-to-peer money transfer service in the United States, and it's going global. And it happens to be doing so using a stablecoin. And there's a largely bank ownership thing. The thing I wonder, as an observer, of course, and putting a hope into the wind here, is that we can find a way in which banks and non-banks, because I think this technology does span both of those, can find an ownership structure that starts to fit, and that we can be inclusive in that process. And speaking of being inclusive in that process, I have to include our sponsors. So we're just going to take a quick break here while we hear from them. 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 secure. 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. Alrighty, thank you so much to our sponsors. We really appreciate you, and we really appreciate Ryan being with us. And of course, Ryan at Citi, you have a heck of a research team. I know Ronnet and the GPS team really well. The Stablecoin 2030 report you actually co-authored projected stablecoin circulation could reach 1.9 trillion dollars under a base case by 2030, and 4 trillion in a bull scenario. But it also argues that tokenized bank deposits could ultimately represent greater transaction volume. So, walk us through that thesis and this like coexistence that you see sort of emerging in that report,

Ryan Rugg  26:02  

absolutely. So with tokenized deposits, again, for kind of the reasons I noted earlier, like it's completely integrated into our client's solution and almost invisible to them. It's just a 24-seven option if and when they want to use it. From a reporting, from a everything is synonymous to what they know today. So this time last year, we were processing millions. Now we're processing billions, so we are seeing really good growth across the ecosystem. And that, that said, with stablecoins, like we do see that you know there are some use cases that clients want to be able to use them, and we want to support that. So we'll continue to build partnerships like we did with Coinbase to be able to do pay-ins and payouts. We'll do that with others. We're building out our custody solution that, if and when clients want to be able to, you know, buy and hold them, it's just an alternative set of rail, Simon. It's that if clients want to use it, we want to be able to provide it. Like we're not selling stablecoins, we're not selling tokenized deposits. Again, if this truly gets integrated, it'll just be behind the scenes for the frictionless movement of fiat and value across the globe, and I think that there's a world where tokenized deposits and stablecoins are very like synonymous in the sense that like what we're solving for is that 21st seven movement of cash. Like we all know, we're still in a world that people use fiat, so they're going to convert their stables back into cash, and right now there's still friction in that system. So imagine being able to bring tokenized deposits and stablecoins together to be able to have that fungibility between cash and tokens instantly. As I said, we're live in five branches now globally. Like right, so it's like you want to be able to redeem a stablecoin and be into a euro instantaneously, being able to do that. So I think there's actually a world that they come closer together. Like, or I think the market wants to polarize it one versus the other. That's not how I look at it at all.

Ran Goldi  27:49  

Yeah, and and I think you you actually said that you know specifically for 2026. The question is, are tokens going to be treated like cash, right? Because like blockchains immutability means you can see the token's entire transaction history. That creates compliance questions that no one has fully resolved. But how many how many hops can we go back? What defines a clean token? How is Citi thinking about these problems like internally? What does it mean for clients who just want to move money? Can I, as your client just looking at as cash, what's the audit for that? When will it become, as you said, like cash?

Ryan Rugg  28:28  

So with tokenized deposits, because if you're a KYC AML client of Citi, you're able to use our platform and move money, and we do all the traditional sanctions, all the traditional checks and balances that you see in our traditional world are done there. I think. Where it starts to add a little bit more complexity, it's like around like stablecoins and other assets. Where if one of our large clients wants to deposit it into the bank, but it was used five hops ago in illicit behavior, like who's responsible? Is it like our KYC client? Is it Citi? Like, or is it considered after a certain amount of hops, it's like you know it's clean, quote unquote. So it's like some of those answers have to be kind of brought to light for like large institutions to feel comfortable taking in those tokens that were potentially used in a sanctioned country or illicit behavior, as well as for their partner banks. And like this is not unique. I mean, we just have extremely conservative governance that we go by and we'll work. We don't ask for forgiveness, so unless it's explicitly clear by our regulators, like we're not going to do it.

Sy Taylor  29:26  

Yeah, you're going to wait that out. If completely makes sense, as one of the world's largest GSEPs, that you would do that. And and I saw just with the sort of recent moving forward of clarity, there were some questions from Governor Waller about the nature of DeFi and unhosted wallets, and so that is not a solved issue. So it's extremely difficult to to step into that. And discretion is the better part of valor, as they always say. So it completely is a logical position. I'm interested in tokenization more broadly as well. I mean, it's more than cash. Cash will be tokenized. I fully agree. That's why we launched a show called Tokenized. But there's also other assets as well. You described 2026 as the that the foundation is being set for the next decade. That's very patient. Number one and number two, it's like kind of a long horizon, but an important one. You alluded to sort of where we got to today, taking a decade, this is one of the most important industries in the world. Finance it moves all of the money, but what does the foundation of this stuff look like when it's done? Like, where are we? Where are we heading to, technically, regulatory, commercially, over the next decade?

Ryan Rugg  30:38  

Yeah, I mean, I think the real unlock is when you have true DVP atomic settlement with other assets across the ecosystem, and you know we kind of started backwards at r3. We were tokenizing bonds, we were tokenizing equity, we were tokenizing mortgages, like you name it, anything under the sun, we were tokenizing. But the problem was there wasn't cash on ledger, you know, until the advent of stablecoins and tokenized deposits and other like you were going back to traditional rails to settle, so it wasn't truly DVP, right? So you still had that latency within the system. So I think that now you're that you're starting to see quote unquote cash or cash equivalents scale with on a blockchain, and now you're starting to see the tokenization of other assets. If it's tokenized money market funds, you're starting to see those scale. You're tokenized CP and like the way that I think about it is you're starting to go up the complexity curve. You know you could argue that cash is one of the most simplistic assets. That if you can't tokenize that, how are you going to tokenize other assets? And then then now tokenize money market funds. You see several asset managers out there starting to do that. But like then you start moving into you know when we were trying to solve collateral movement at r3, which AQLAX back in 2016, we didn't have cash on change, so it didn't. It was still inefficient. Where now we have those cash or cash equivalents that are starting to get, you know, I say more traction. I think you're going to start to see more of these tokenized assets and efficiency in the system, that latency being removed. That the future of networks, as you mentioned, is always on multi-asset, multi-currency, multi-border. Like you're able to move assets on a 24-seven basis, and like think about our kids. Like they've had data at the tips of their fingertips since they were born. Like they're not going to want to open an account. They're not going to want to wait t plus 2t, plus one. Like that's not going to be their nature. Like they're going to want instantaneous movement of assets and cash, and like that's what we're building towards.

Sy Taylor  32:24  

It completely makes sense. I mean, my my big focus at Tempo, as you will know, Ryan, is to be the best ledger for cash in the world because once you've got that, you can build the other assets after it. But without that, you've got nothing. Collateral mobility is nothing if it's cash settled, right? You, it's the prerequisite. So how do you how do you build that, and and where do you get to the next decade? I massively agree on the problem area, Goldie. It's time for the final question. You ready?

Ran Goldi  32:49  

I can't believe the the story is about to end. Like this flew by so quickly, but but really, Ryan, final question, and we asked this to all of our guests, and I think you have a unique point of view here. 20 years from now, stablecoins are they just a story or are they a fact?

Ryan Rugg  33:06  

I think if we're successful in this industry and we continue to implement and scale, and like again, I talked about it earlier, authenticate that complexity of the blockchain. Like we will have real time value of money, stablecoins, tokenized deposits across the ecosystem that truly allows for that atomic settlement and DVP and like rewiring the whole financial system

Sy Taylor  33:26  

makes complete sense. That sort of rewiring is what we're all here to do. One tokenized episode at a time, one day of your crazy calendar at a time, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to thank everybody for watching and listening wherever they're doing that, Ryan. If people do want to learn more about City Token Services or anything you're doing, how do they get hold of you and Citi?

Ryan Rugg  33:47  

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. We're very responsive there. We're continuously posting like what we're doing, as well as you know, we have a bunch of events coming up where we're going to be talking about new launches. So hopefully to see everyone there. But I really appreciate the time and having me on.

Sy Taylor  34:01  

Thank you. How about you, Goldie?

Ran Goldi  34:03  

I'm at Rangoldy on X and Rand Goldy on LinkedIn, and of course Fireblocks.com.

Sy Taylor  34:08  

You'll find me at SY Taylor on all of the socials, screaming into the void at fintechbrainfood.com, and of course at tempo.xyz, doing lengthy white papers about off-hours cash settlement using stablecoins because that's what I live for, people. And you'll find a lot, lot more of this show if you go ahead and subscribe and spam all of your friends to subscribe to because this conversation deserves it, doesn't it? Ryan was an absolute superstar today. I will have more episodes coming for you in the not too distant future. Take care and bye for now.