Why Thunes Chose Stablecoins for Cross Border

Ran Goldi  0:10  

Welcome to Tokenize, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. I'm Simon Taylor, your host, author at FinTech Brain Food and head of market dev at Tempo. And joining me again is my friend and co-host Rangoldie, SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks. Talk to us about stablecoin stories. What is it? Why? Why does it exist? Why? Well, it exists because people need to hear the truth, Simon. People are had enough of PRs. They had enough of LinkedIn. They don't want to read fake Twitter feeds. They want to know what's the real deal behind the stories, and they want to know what's the story behind the story, and this is why today we brought a person who has been here for a long time in our space. He's going to tell us a lot of good stories. This is Pritpal Shokar from Tunes. He's now the head of product for Tunes for digital asset, and we're going to give you Pritpal the fifth degree on what your

Sy Taylor  1:00  

story is. Heck yeah! Before we bring Pripal up, I just want to remind viewers and listeners that views and opinions of our contributors today may be 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 of course, I have to thank our sponsor for this show for making it possible. Fireblocks, Pripal, give me a little context on you. Give me a little context on the stablecoin offering at Toons. I want to know a little bit about your background. My show notes say you're a bit of a crypto OG, and I want to know how you find yourself at Tunes. Give me, give me that story.

Pritpal Shokar  1:34  

Yeah, thanks, everyone, guys. So, just a little backdrop. So, I think before I got into the crypto space, all started really when I was actually working as a cashier. So back in the retail banking, that's when I first started handling money. So this is actual physical money over the counter. So you know deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and what I was doing back then was I was actually updating a ledger, which was the system ledger at the time. And I recall actually a specific moment when I was working, and in one of the branches that I was working in, the systems went down, and we were offline. But the decision was made to carry on processing transactions, and we recorded transactions by hand on a piece of paper, and customers just carried on depositing, withdrawing cash, and the trust was in us, right? So they trusted us just to update the systems, and it was all based on trust. And afterwards, we had to you know reconcile and balance them. Fast forward a few years, and as I've gone through my career, one of my friends forwarded me the Bitcoin white paper, and I was fascinated from there. And it kind of came a little bit full circle because this was a different system. It was still a ledger at heart, but it removed this reliance on all these individuals at heart, and it was all around this concept of being shared and actually encoded as well. And I think for that, that's what struck a chord with me because actually it was a ledger distributed and updating by itself, and there was no longer individuals and a telesystem at play. It was global by default, and I think that's when when I became fascinated with crypto, really. And since then, I've I've not really looked back.

Sy Taylor  3:04  

You got the global wide default bug and and the white papers bug, and it's one it's one I kind of know well. Especially you had to be dealing with the back end of a ledger. It's it's as every bit as ugly as it sounds. So take me back to those early days because payments has been this killer use case, but it just took so long to materialize. So, what does it look like as Pripal, who's got this bug for like 24/7 and not seeing it coming, but seeing speculation happen? But then you've sort of been a payments guy.

Pritpal Shokar  3:34  

Yeah, so I think it's quite unique in my role because I'm still at the cusp of blurring the boundaries between the crypto space and the tradfi space, and I think what cryptos got right from day one is the concept of settlement, real-time settlement. And what I mean by that is, in the tradfi space, we still see as more of a messaging infrastructure layer. So messages move, but the value doesn't actually move. It's so the settlement isn't moving. So if I think about again, right when I was updating the records on those systems, nothing was moving in reality. It was just data being updated. So I think again, being always on 24 7365, by default, and the actual fact that money is moving on chain, I think that was quite different. And I think at the moment that gap now is slowly decreasing, but it's still there, and that's where the challenge still lies, which is in the blurring boundaries between the old world and and the new world.

Ran Goldi  4:28  

And you've been through, I mean, many cycles. I think, right? Like, how many crypto cycles have you been through propel by now?

Pritpal Shokar  4:36  

I'd say at least three my time.

Ran Goldi  4:39  

Okay, and I'm sure you have the scars to prove it. I've been through three or four. I don't know. I probably tried to forget about them, but I feel that every crypto cycles gives you more clarity, right? Like that was the 2017 cycle. We learned, you know, never to give people. Randomly meet in the toilet money for investment for their ICO. Great. Then we had the cycle of you know 2021 22. I think we've learned never to overpay for JPEGs that are offered as as NFTs, right? But like, give me like one of those insights that you've learned through those cycles,

Pritpal Shokar  5:22  

yeah, sure. So first of all, I agree we are in a bear cycle, but this bear cycle is different, and we've seen it because in this new world, the volatility in the market-a couple of percent single digits-people are scared. You've been there, right, Goldie, and I'm sure you have Simon, right? We were double digits volatility. That's when it was scary. So I think it has baselined a little bit, and I think that's because the institutions have come on board, and also the regulatory clarity. I think that that is helping it kind of subside. The difference for me with especially stablecoins is I think that it's actually breaking away now. So typically, the crypto volatility has been around, you know, speculation use case, and the volume has been pure trading. Now we are seeing a little bit of decoupling. I've seen where transfers now and on-chain activity, while it is still relatively small, and we know it's only one 2% that is increasing, and it's actual real-world use cases. So treasury management, payroll, remittances, we are seeing that, and also even during this so-called bear market, we're seeing a lot of more building solutions. So I'm sure we'll cover some of the announcements today, and you guys are very close to yourselves. People are building solutions to solve your problems, and that's something that we weren't doing before. And you mentioned the NFT, Fed Reckoldy. I remember being at one of the token 2047 events, and everyone just wanted profile pics, right? And thankfully, we've moved on from there. I don't think that helped our industry, but we have moved forward. Yeah,

Ran Goldi  6:51  

no, but I mean, I I will say that the parties were better when NFTs were the hype. But obviously, yes, thank God we've moved on from that. We're no longer we're more about utility, and and I can tell you that's the truth because 65% of the volume right now on on our platform on Fireblocks is stablecoins, right? And we move about 15% of global blockchain movement, so it definitely changed from 8% four years ago to 65% That's about $4 trillion right now. So yes, very much moved, and I think this is why companies like Tunes are here, right?

Sy Taylor  7:28  

I don't like the implication, Goldie, that payments people don't know how to party. Those people have clearly never been to FinTech NerdCon in San Diego on the 19th or 20th of November. Tickets are available now, and we yes, we are still looking for sponsors because it will be like no other show you've ever seen before. But I love that data. I'm

Speaker 1  7:47  

there.

Sy Taylor  7:47  

You'll be there, of course. Propal is a guest and welcome to come along, of course. But the the thing that I think has changed is that industry maturity that comes along with it, and that data you shared, Goldie, is super interesting because I keep looking at this chart that shows like crypto prices growing down, but stablecoin volume and supply staying static, and I'm like, well, what's happening to all of the stablecoin volume, and how's that shifting? It's very, it's hard to know what those transactions are for. God bless Artemis and Alium; they've really tried, but it's the best you can do is estimate. But you sort of speak to a Pripal. You speak to some others, and you're like, "Yeah, no, we're seeing kindling. It's smaller than the rest of our business, but it's but it's meaningful. I'm going to take a quick ad break here, and we're going to come back to to all of that stuff with Pripal in just a second. Stablecoin operations usually mean a wallet from one vendor and on ramp from another, and then controls stitched together across all of them. Visa's stablecoin platform fixes this fundamentally. You can mint, move, and manage stablecoins across OpenUSD, and you remain your own custodian all in one single environment. Then stablecoin link cards let you spend balances anywhere Visa is accepted. That's Visa, the global leader in payments, and of course, sponsor of this show. You can find out more at Visa.com forward slash crypto. 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 to our sponsors, Pritpal. Talk about where you are today. Talk about where Toons is today. Tunes is, if people don't know, one of the largest cross-border payments companies in the world. But remind people who don't know what Tunes is, and give me the top line, and then double click into the stablecoin business for me.

Pritpal Shokar  10:25  

Sure, yeah. So I guess as a top line, we're global cross-border payments infrastructure provider. So we provide solutions that allow global businesses to accept or pay out, and that's our core offering. And it's all around coverage and a true global network. So it's taken us 10 years to build this network. So we operate across 140 countries, 90 currencies, 220 payment methods. So it's all around how do we abstract complexity from our customers and integrate with our single APIs. That's where we are. That's where we have been. And with me coming on board and just prior to me joining, we've been looking at first of all stablecoins as an internal experiment, which is where we started our journey. So, how can we look at how we can solve problems internally? And the big move for us was around treasury movements. So we saw the efficiencies we could gain. You know, this whole pre-funding and liquidity trap that we've, I know you discussed some previous episodes. That was where we saw the real benefits, and we started thinking and thinking about well, how can we offer this to our customers? Fast forwarding where we are today, so our customers now can pre-fund us in stablecoins, so USDC and EuroC to start with. That's freeing up some of their liquidity challenges they have, and on the opposite side, I mentioned currently we have payment methods which include bank accounts, mobile wallets, cards. We've also added stablecoins as another payment rail, and they compare in USDC and USDT, and that is very much how we're framing it for our side. It's another currency type, so we are agnostic of currency types and also countries. And I think what that concept for us is embedding it within our solutions, and again making it simple for our customers to access. And just a little bit of a segue. I think that one of the key ones for us for paying out in stablecoins, especially, is that customers can have the option they can integrate via an API or actually via Swift. So we've got you know one and a half 1000 banks already directly connected to Swift, and that's quite simple for them to use their existing Swift membership to pay out, and that's what we're trying to do, which is meet the customers where they are and where the demand is. Nice, and and and by the way, for for those who don't know, and Praka, I'm sure you know because you know you've been there for a while, but like Tuz is a very interesting company. Like it started back in 2005, by by Eric Barbier, by the way, who used to be to be here as a guest in our podcast, and he started that company as something called Transfer Two, and it went through a lot of different like hops along the way. Eric eventually obviously sold that out. He's now the CEO of a crypto company

Ran Goldi  13:00  

called AAA, and it took tunes. and And I'll tell you, Pertel, I don't think we met back then. But when I was when I had my company before Fireblocks that Fireblocks acquired, we were doing payments over blockchain in 2017. This was a time where people did not want to do payments over blockchain. They told us, please go away and leave the premise, and we we knocked on Tunes doors multiple times trying to convince them to do that. Obviously, kicked us. Obviously, we came back for the window. That didn't matter. Kicked us again, but in the last two years, and correct me if I'm wrong, Tunes sort of said maybe like a lot of companies, we have to do stable coins. Fine, we'll do it. We'll add something, but then I think it was surprised by the demand and the magnitude of how many people actually want to do pre-funding. How many people actually do want to get paid? Like, can you tell me something about something that happened in the company internally between what they thought they're launching as a gimmick to what's now like a full-pledged department that you're heading the product of.

Pritpal Shokar  14:04  

Yeah, sure. So I mentioned before about solving those internal use cases. I think that was the experiment for us. Tunes was, as it always has done, is monitor and keep track of marketing industry events. I mentioned that global network we've got, so we have expertise in a lot of these local areas. I think we started seeing grassroots level adoption in some of these areas, and we're strong in these global south and these emerging economies. And we could see actual real world utility use cases now for stablecoins. So naturally, for us, we could see our customers and users they were demanding stablecoins. So we wanted to be able to facilitate our customers to continue to operate on a global scale, so that was one of them. And also, I mentioned from a liquidity challenge, I think having those 90 currencies and 140 currencies managing managing liquidity in all those countries, you know, locking up currency, you know, over some of these volatile weekends, these. Extra long public holidays-you can imagine, you know, sometimes the risk we're taking on. So, in order to actually leverage final unchained settlement in almost real time, whilst it's still a growing concept and some of our network partners aren't there yet, it's definitely helping us. So that's why I think we saw and see the opportunity there. And the other thing I would also add is that we now actually have a new set of customers who have started in this kind of crypto-native space, whether it's actually trading or payments use cases, and now are looking for the other side, which is the realization that at some stage we need to get back into the fiat world, and for them, because they operate natively in stablecoins, we want to be able to make it seamless for them as well, so they don't need to get out of you know into fear and then come into our world straight into our world using stable coins. I'm seeing a lot of demand there, and that's how we're leveraging our network for them as well.

Sy Taylor  15:52  

It's so interesting how everybody discovers that like payments are not natively global from the crypto world and from the tradfi world. You have all of this pain of dealing with a currency that can move 10% over a three-day weekend. And actually, if you can figure out your treasury problem, you'll attract these crypto-native clients by being fluent in that, and that's a growing segment. But you can start to solve problems for some of your other customers with some of the products you've outlined. But like, I think everybody's attracted by the the top line sales pitch of better, faster, cheaper, but that cheaper's not always the case, is it? So how how do you think about like where do you say the provable value is? You know, like what's the tangible business case that is usually true about stablecoins for most people most of the time.

Pritpal Shokar  16:44  

Yes, it's a great question, and I totally agree. I think that is sometimes it gets industry in trouble because everyone assumes it's cheaper, and when you're speaking to customers and it's not, they're a little bit surprised. So I think we've can probably do a little bit better than saying it's always cheaper, and then once you price in the offfront and the FX, especially in these thin corridors, sometimes it actually can be more expensive. So I think the key thing on that is is on demanding liquidity for me, and I mentioned this always on settlement and also the reach. So we know in certain corridors, the correspondent banking or real time domestic rails aren't real time, and that means if you're trying to actually get funds to a network partner to pay out for us to do the FX, there are no alternative options. So actually, that's where stablecoins flip that. So not only is it on demand, but actually you can plug that gap as well. So I think it's helping with that liquidity management piece, and I think it does come back to not just the cost side of things, but with the speed, there's other benefits, and I don't think you realize those until you start exploring in this space. That's what we see.

Ran Goldi  17:47  

Well, I think both Simon and I have similar views. I mean, Simon always says stablecoins are cheaper; they're better, right? And he actually has a really good article on that on on findic brain food. I usually say, you know, stablecoins are not cheaper; they're faster. And if you can capture value from speed, for example, we had in one of our episodes, we were talking with Citi about you know trade finance and commodities and how you can actually gain value from paying your exporters faster and whatnot. That I think really makes stablecoins the case today. And people should admit that stablecoins feel cheaper because they're subsidized by VCs. And basically, you have like tons of these VCs putting money into chains, putting money into companies, putting money the chains themselves, the blockchains, obviously giving subsidies of sorts because they want to encourage utility. It's all fair, but if you go to now a nascent company that have never seen a stablecoin, sometimes they just even expect to make money out of stablecoins, and you know what? That's that that can't really be the case all the time. But I hear what you're saying, Pripal. I do agree. Let's talk about the products that you're building. You're building really at this intersection of tradifying crypto tunes. Again, not a crypto company, obviously. Now a digital asset native will become such a company, but building at this intersection is hard because you you have the legacy, let's call it, of the fiat world and the compliance and risk and everything about that, and you want to run faster with embedded wallets for crypto and yield and staking and all these things. Like, how does it feel to be in that specific place? And I guess like what's the philosophy behind solving problems when when you get that friction?

Pritpal Shokar  19:47  

So if I take a step back and think about it from two different lenses, so I think from a philosophical perspective, I think about where I was before my journey. I wanted to go down the path of removing all these intermediaries. It's a little bit of an irony here because that tunes actually we've become a single intermediary, so we are still an intermediary at its heart. What we're trying to do is again make it easier for our customers to access that global coverage. So I think what was actually the goal wasn't you know getting rid of intermediaries; it was access, and that's what we're trying to unlock here. So I think being a middle person or middle player still serves a purpose, and that's abstracting that away. From the product side of things, I think some of the challenges we've had in this space is is still an evolving piece, which is we work in an industry that's moving very fast. We've got regulation, you know, coming very soon. Some clarity back in the UK, here we've seen some great announcements and clarity coming soon. The US is obviously pushing forward with theirs, and then from the compliance side, and that's been quite a key problem as well. And both of those on a little bit more educational piece still. So I think we are still early in this industry. We're seeing a lot of traction, but if you think about the global industry, we're still early, and compliance has been quite a challenge in this space, and although the fundamental principles are the same around KYC, you think about how the two different worlds operate and these concepts of travel, self-custodial wallets, custodial wallets. It's about trying to merge the two together so it's actually easier for us to operate, and that takes a lot of time to put in those frameworks in place. But we are getting then. I think we actually have got then. So it's around making sure that, from operational perspective, you're ready for those different types of flows, and that's what we've been working on.

Sy Taylor  21:33  

Yeah, when you're regulated, you got all the licenses in all of those markets, and there are markets that are outside Singapore and outside of Hong Kong, and outside of the U.S. and outside of Asia, and those markets may even have currency controls, and you might have a license. There's so much complexity that your compliance team has to wrestle with to to try and do this at scale. I think people underestimate how that hard that is, and then you've got the new complexities of like there's several flavors of U.S. dollar. You know, least USDC, USDT, new consortia popping up. How do you think about supporting this multi-stable coin world, where you know, sort of onshore in the US, maybe USDC is more popular, but offshore it's all USDT. How do you think about that?

Pritpal Shokar  22:15  

Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and I know we just seen a recent announcement, and I know yourselves are part of that with Open USD, and we do work with a lot of well, we have a lot of conversations with issuers who are keen to join our network. For us, again, first we look at the market dynamics and the market demand, and then the customer demand. And for me, it's really working behind the tokenomics and the detail behind how these are actually issued, and there are sort of nuances. And again, you mentioned right, Simon, being regulated and having to be compliant globally. We have to be very mindful of how some of these constructs are put together. So we know the concept around you know yields slash rewards. That's an evolving space, and I think it's quite interesting with the Open USD announcement. I think it's fantastic minting, redeeming being zero cost. I think that should always be the way. And with the partners actually receiving some of the earnings from reserves, interesting again. For me, I'm still waiting for a little bit more detail, and maybe you guys will share in due course. But I think it's quite interesting. And then for us, I think from the infrastructure side of things, you know, we've had those 10 years to try to be agnostic from the get-go. So we're already agnostic from the ground in terms of currencies and payment methods. So when we kind of constructive running stablecoins, we think about well, to us, just another partner on our network. The mechanics are different, but we need to think about how it works. And then fundamentally, it's around liquidity again. So, if we do bring on a new issuer, a new stablecoin, how do we get in and out of that position effectively? Are there incentives or interest for us to to hold that potentially, either for us for our customers, or actually do we need to get in and out of that position as quick as possible? And I think that's the balancing act between utility for our customers versus what we can use as well.

Ran Goldi  24:04  

I have to tell you something about intermediaries that regarding you know what you said before. After I was doing trading and before I started my payments on blockchain company back in 2016 17, I spent a lot of time in Burning Man for like a year, running our own festivals doesn't show. I know, right? And and this is why I still get invited to some parties. But anyway, so I was I was in a conversation about Bitcoin with a Bitcoin maximalist and a professor of finance from Harvard.

Sy Taylor  24:37  

It sounds like a beginning of a joke, you know, like a Bitcoin maximalist and a Harvard professor walk into Burning Man,

Ran Goldi  24:43  

and and meet a Goldie, right? And and meet a bold Goldie, and and and basically they, the Bitcoin maximalists were saying we're gonna destroy the banks and we're gonna kill all intermediaries, and the guy from Harvard, he was you know whatever is he was very calm. I don't know what he took the. This was Burning Man, but he was very common. He sort of like said, you know, there's a research by Harvard that looked at the last 100 years and looked at every technological innovation that came out and claimed that it will kill intermediaries, and it actually showed how over time there's always a room for an intermediary to, by the way, always take on average eventually 2% because there needs to be a trust factor that both sides can basically use to transact. And he tried to explain that those are sometimes the financial institutions, right? Now again, I know Bitcoin whitepaper, which I have framed behind a lot of Yodas here, obviously talks about trust and maybe it will intermediate some things that we have trust in today. But I think it's interesting, like you said, Tunes is probably not going to go away because people want to work with a company like Tunes, right? So anyway, back to your role at Tunes, right? Let's say we're looking five years out, right? Where do you see digital assets at Tunes? Is it just like oh we had some stable coins here that was great now there's a different payment rail because someone else did something else, or is it just is it a niche from what you're seeing, or is it like the largest team in the company? Right, like are you seeing volume and flows growing constantly over the next five years, or how are you thinking about this?

Pritpal Shokar  26:26  

Sure. So I think about in terms of the volume and traction we're seeing. So I mentioned we are seeing increasing customer demand, and I mentioned this new core customers now who are actively looking for a tuned solution. So I do think we'll start, we'll we'll carry on seeing that demand, and for me actually, I think there's net new demand coming our way. So we know more of the renewable assets are now being tokenized. So you know, got money market funds and even you know stocks and and shares for users to operate with tokenized assets. They obviously need tokenized money. So now we're in the realms of increased stablecoin adoption. But then again, at some point, although I'm in favor of you know a stablecoin native economy, there will be still use cases, especially in the retail world, where eventually an individual, and I come back to the point of you know at the end of the day, there is an individual receiving those funds will need to pay their tax invoice. That's going to be in fiat. Might need to pay an invoice for rent, for example, in fiat. So there's always going to be a demand for fiat. I think the ratio may evolve, but I think there's always going to be use case for that. And I think even further out, you know, maybe it's not five years, maybe it's 10 years. I know you guys have discussed this before around we've seen the eugenic economy now. So actually, it's not businesses as far as our customers are concerned, or the end users. It's agents, and I think they'll be also operating on chain. And again, they'll need wallets. They'll need stable coins to potentially operate on that. But then, if they want to come back into the real world, I think they will need to come back to the fiat world, and that's where we see our space. So, I think from our perspective, I love people to say my team will be the biggest and we're going to take over tunes. But the reality is we're not, and I'm actually comfortable with that because I think if my team is still relatively small but the volume is still taking off, it means we've served our purpose, which is to become the plumbing underneath how we're actually moving money and settling, and it's not necessarily always around the actual buzzwords we're selling to the markets. How we're internally moving funds. I think that's going to be the real value for me.

Sy Taylor  28:28  

Yeah, the internal treasury stuff, especially as money market funds come on, just looks like a no-brainer.

Ran Goldi  28:34  

And Simon, he said Agentic, and we're letting him fly with it, just because he's a guest that we like very much. But we're, you know, Britpal, we're we're trying to we're trying to find the agentic users who are sending you know 5000 agents and buying. We still couldn't find them, but no, I'm kidding. I agree. It will be big, obviously. As a tech person, I believe in that.

Sy Taylor  28:52  

It's when not if, isn't it? Look, I I totally buy it too. It's one of those difficult things, though. It's timing these things, and I think you know you've been through this journey. You've obviously learned a lot of lessons. I'm curious, Pripal, what you wish you knew back then that you've now figured out, and the advice you'd give to people building in the space today based on those lessons.

Pritpal Shokar  29:16  

Sure. So two things come to mind. The first one, which I wish I knew was don't fall in love with just the technology, which I did do. Like you need to fall in love with the problem. So don't worry about the chain, the token, this particular network.

Sy Taylor  29:31  

Yeah, yeah.

Pritpal Shokar  29:31  

It's around trying to actually solve the problem, and that's that's the boring work and the hard work, the regulated work, and that needs to be the foundation for everything you do. So I think that's a lesson learned. You know, I've definitely got scars in that space.

Ran Goldi  29:44  

100% I still hold a bag of Cardano. I'm kidding. No one held a bag of Cardano ever.

Pritpal Shokar  29:49  

Yeah, I also had that that dabbling in the the meme con area. And the second one is that I'm remembering that the reason why Last Mile exists and that there's. The real person, the end of it again. So I think again, we might get lost in this, you know, machine to machine payment space, and you know, it'd be great for the economy. But I think we need to realize that there is someone there. So build for the problem, not the technology. Never forget, there's someone there. And if you get those two things right, I think you can go quite far in this space.

Ran Goldi  30:18  

Agree. I want to ask you something about before our last question. I've met with one of the, I guess, product leaders at one of the largest PSPs, and I've been talking to this guy for many years. I'm not going to mention the name of the company. It was it was Adian, and and basically Peter told me their head of product. He said, "Goldie, I like talking to you, but you know what? I had enough. I had enough of crypto people who do not come from payments who try to sell me crypto solutions. I need people from payments to understand my pain and help me solve a problem, right? And I think exactly that's what you were saying, Pritpal. That a lot of people fell in love of the technology and lost sight of what we are really trying to solve, which is you know problems in payments, how to move value faster, how people can get paid faster, how remittance can move faster. That's what it's all about. And if we have the tech to do it, great. If we have the VCs to subsidize it for now, also great. I'm kidding. This is obviously the real issue: solving problems.

Sy Taylor  31:27  

Pripal, what problems are you solving right now that you think are unsolved? What are you focused on at the moment at Tunes, and and what's keeping you up at night?

Pritpal Shokar  31:36  

So we've spoken a lot about liquidity optimization. So for me, it's on-chain effects and liquidity management. So what I'm trying to solve is so you know we have 220 network members at the moment. We've had a lot of you know strong and good partners that we use at the moment to reach that global presence. What I'd like to be able to do is fund every single corridor with the option to have stablecoins as a pre-funding or funding mechanism, that's still quite small as a percentage where we are today. So one of the things I'm looking at is how do we unlock that? So working with our partners, working with some of the players in the ecosystem, how can we work together to optimize and get those efficiencies? So I'm always constantly thinking about again regulation. You know, a new regulation pops up. That's something we saw P virus come up. It'll be out of the blue, but great to see. So it's always thinking ahead what's going to come next and be prepared so we can pivot very quickly. So, and that's what's keeping me up at night, I guess.

Sy Taylor  32:33  

Yeah, liquidity is such a real problem. It's the thing that 24/7 sounds like it should solve, and yet somehow it doesn't. It's it's such an issue, isn't it? Goldie, any final thoughts before our closing question?

Ran Goldi  32:48  

No, I think Pripal hit all of the major topics we want to talk about. I think Pripal really, thank you. And and I'm going to ask the last question, which is the question we ask everyone. I wonder what your response will be because maybe you'll tell me about something I'm not considering. But 20 years from now, are we still talking about stablecoins? Are we talking about something else? Were they just a story, or are they now a fact?

Pritpal Shokar  33:16  

They will become a fact, in my opinion. I think it'll be part of a bigger picture, though. So I think it won't be the only form of tokenized money. So we know we've seen tokenized deposits. We know CBDCs may launch soon. So I think volume will continue to grow. I think there'll be a high usage, as we've already discussed on this show, around treasury management. I think that's where the most of the volume will be. I'm fascinated to see where this agentic economy actually ends up. I think you're right, Goldie. We don't know who's actually sending these payments just yet, but we can see where the economy is heading. There's investments in this space. I think it's almost inevitable that we'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there. So I think, yeah, I think machine-to-machine payments, if they are run on stable coins, then it's going to be the preferred method of transacting, so definitely think it's going to be the future.

Sy Taylor  34:04  

It's going to be more than a story for the sure of it. All right. Well, listen, I want to thank you so much, Prepal, for being on the show, and I want to thank everybody for for watching and listening. If people want to find out more about you and Tunes make their liquidity a little bit more optimized and 24/7 and pay up to more markets in a way that's faster, then how do they do that?

Pritpal Shokar  34:23  

So you can reach me personally on LinkedIn and Tunis. You can hit us up at our website, and we've also got quite a bit of a presence on our LinkedIn as well. So quite frequently publish some good articles there as well.

Sy Taylor  34:33  

Goldie,

Ran Goldi  34:34  

I'm Iran Goldie on LinkedIn on X. You can also find me on ICQ at 803 1026. That's my number.

Sy Taylor  34:41  

Old school, I respect it. You'll find me at all of the socials on at sy Taylor. You'll find me screaming into the void at fintechbrainfood.com, and of course over at tempo.xyz. And you'll find a lot more of this show if you subscribe. And if you want to say thank you, leave us a review. That's what makes the biggest difference for us. Catch you next time.