CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Morning everyone, quite excited for this. The first person to join me is going to be Erica from Lead Bank. 

She is the cofounder and also the CLO and risk officer. She brings extreme expertise in banking and fintech, and she’s trying to really connect stablecoins to the rest of the financial system. 

Next one up, we have Dimitri, cofounder and CEO of Modern Treasury. He’s actually building those payment flows and workflows that stablecoins promise to bring to market, so we’ll hear more about that in a second. 

Next one up we have Chris, cofounder and CEO of Yellow Card. Yellow Card has been deploying stablecoins and bringing, really, payment experiences to market in Africa for a number of years, and they’re the leading licensed provider in the region.

And last but not least, Shan from Coinbase. He’s the VP for corporate and business development. He also manages a lot of the Coinbase Venture experiments and bets, so if there’s anyone that has seen the future of this space, it’s probably Shan. Please welcome the entire panel again. 

Okay, so we have a challenge here. People have said stablecoin panels tend to be slow and boring, mostly because everybody agrees stablecoins are going to be the future. So we’re going to try to mix things up and bring some controversy to the topic. Let’s see if we’ll succeed. So I’d love to hear first, why are you excited about stablecoins on one side, and on the other side, what keeps you up at night thinking about this technology really coming into the market? 

SHAN AGGARWAL: So for me, I think something that’s been clear for us for a long time is just the promise of stablecoins, the promise to bring payments at Internet scale. We started Center [Coin] and helped cofound USDC dating back to 2018. But something that’s changed over the last 12 months is just seeing it come to life where stablecoins are now really usable, and I think that’s really attributable to basically three new innovations. 

So one is we now have low-cost layer one and layer two protocols like Base that allow for seamless money transfer in stablecoins around the world. 

The second is the consumer experience has really gotten much more abstracted and simple through developments like embedded wallets and smart wallets that remove the need for gas and seed phrases and other points of friction for end consumers. 

And then last is transactional service providers like Bridge and BVNK that should make it a lot easier for businesses to just think about payments and make fiat and stablecoins effectively interoperable. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: What keeps you up at night? 

SHAN AGGARWAL: There’s a lot of things. I think that when people talk about stablecoins, there’s almost like a misnomer. It’s a very broadly used term, like what is a stablecoin, what’s not a stablecoin. And there’s not a very well-agreed-upon definition as to yet as to what the underlying requirements are to be a stablecoin. And so I think in the past, that’s led to a lot of confusion and actually issues when you have things like Terra/Luna that are labeled a stablecoin, but actually lead to a lot of losses. So I’m hopeful that stablecoin legislation can help solve some of those challenges. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Erica, you’ve seen this up and close. 

ERICA KHALILI: You said legislation. I knew it was coming my way. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: There you go. 

ERICA KHALILI: No, I think what I’m the most excited about is when I think about the digital assets ecosystem and where we’ve seen that move in the prior years, seeing sort of the recent credentialization of the industry via regulatory reforms such as the GENIUS Act, which is in the political quagmire as we literally speak, but seeing that the stablecoin interoperability really unblocks and solves a problem. 

Like it started with a problem to be solved, which was global money movement and making it accessible. And you’re seeing these abstraction layers, like the card that Bridge is offering with us at Lead, and being able to actually access those funds and spend them in a real-world way I think solves so many problems, especially the last mile problem that you always had to solve with the conversion to fiat. 

Now what keeps me up at night is, as the cofounder of a bank I do worry about the impact that the reserve holding and things that are in the legislative process right now may have on the US banking system. And I think that that’s where the credentialization—we’re in this sort of uptick where you’re seeing a lot more adoption. You’re seeing people being open to it. 

And you really want to have that market penetration that’s not just huge multinationals. And we talked about this in prep. A local business in—I’m going to use Kansas City, Missouri, because that’s where Lead’s located—but in Kansas City, they can find the value of the stablecoin technology and making sure that the regulation matches that and that the banks that are supporting this also are incentivized to keep doing it in a safe and responsible manner. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Chris, you’ve exported the technology in a very different market. What’s different in Africa? What can others learn from your experience? 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah. I think when it comes to stablecoins, the thing that gets me the most excited is the potential of the technology to pave better connectivity to emerging markets and to sort of the rest of the world outside of the US and Europe. I know I differ from some of the industry when I say this, but I have sent money to Europe before. It’s not actually that hard. It works kind of fine. 

And I think when you think of SWIFT and the traditional correspondent banking system, you have essentially these money movement superhighways, and this interstate system that is at least decently maintained. But then you have these winding dirt roads through the Grand Canyon to essentially all emerging markets around the world—to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to South America. 

And stablecoins are the first technology that actually pave those roads, and actually provide some connectivity for merchants in Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Argentina, etc. to really be able to interact with those broader money movement superhighways and interact with the traditional banking system and SWIFT and things like that in, how do you say, developed markets in a way that they couldn’t before. 

And it provides that access to businesses around those parts of the world that just otherwise are not able to interact with that system, because of illiquidity, because of disconnectivity from SWIFT, because the correspondent banking system was never set up for those parts of the world. It was intended for the US and Europe and developed markets. 

And so I think that, to me, the most exciting part is less so the amazing things that it is doing in the US and in developed markets. To me, the most exciting part is it’s the first technology that actually provides a solution in the developing world and in emerging markets. 

ERICA KHALILI: Can I disagree with you a little bit on that one? 

CHRIS MAURICE: Of course.

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Yes, please. 

ERICA KHALILI: Sorry. I told you I was going to have an opinion when we prepped. I think SWIFT has a great use case, and even when you think about sending money to Europe via SWIFT, it’s fine, but do you feel like it’s great? Is it exceptional? Is it something that you’re like, “Wow, I feel great about doing this?” And then when you think about not just the geo, because I’m a chief risk officer, but also the use case associated with it, there’s so many different industries that are blocked out of that because of the complexity of the various regimes, even within developed markets. 

So the way I think about all of the payment rails is, is there a completely logical and appropriate use case for ACH, for SWIFT, for all of these rails? Absolutely. But does stablecoin technology fill a void in the system, both from a geographical, but also from a use case perspective, that just makes it a really interesting rail? Like that’s kind of how—I don’t know that it’s a zero sum game for stables, but I think it’s more of the right-sized rail for the transaction you’re trying to execute and that choice. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah, yeah. It’s undeniably better, right? It’s a better technology no matter what part of the world you’re in. I think the reason that you’ve seen so much adoption so quickly in emerging markets is because there is no alternative in a lot of the countries that we operate in. There’s no other option. There’s no plan B. There’s no incumbent. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: How much of that do you think is driven by the fact that accessing dollars in Africa, in pockets of Asia, in many parts of the globe, LATAM, is difficult, right? It’s been typically controlled between capital controls and other measures. How much of stablecoin’s inroads are driven by that versus the utility you described where you’re moving money across borders? 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah, it is. That is a big part of it, but it’s not necessarily because of capital controls. I think the liquidity issues that most of these countries face are a bug as opposed to a feature, and there are a number of reasons that we can get into around why it’s difficult to access dollars in certain markets. But in most cases it’s not because it is illegal to access dollars or illegal to move money. 

However, if you go to a bank and you try to move that money, the bank’s going to tell you that there’s no money to move. And so there are a number of issues with liquidity, there’s a number of issues with connectivity to SWIFT, corresponding banking, etc. that exist in these markets. And being able to access dollars outside of the banking system that can move anywhere instantly within seconds is extremely powerful for businesses that have never had anything like that. 

SHAN AGGARWAL: I think just one extension of that is—we’re talking a lot about payments very specifically—but for Coinbase, one thing that we’re really excited about is it’s sort of like the Trojan horse into this broader on-chain financial services economy. Because it starts with maybe a core basic need, which is “Hey, I have an unstable currency. I need to hold a US dollar, but I can’t get access to that dollar.” The next might be “Hey, I need to send money to my family that’s living in another country.” But then beyond that, it could be, “Hey, I need to take out a loan that’s collateralized by a tokenized version of my house.” Like that doesn’t exist in a lot of these countries. 

And so I think that’s something that’s really exciting for us, is it’s really sort of the Trojan horse into getting accessibility to a broader suite of financial services that just don’t really exist in a lot of these countries. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Dimitri, you started Modern Treasury without stablecoins, and now you’re exploring this new space. It’s clear we’re in a gold rush, right? We heard it yesterday in the keynote, AI and stablecoins are the two key words of the future. Why did you start exploring stablecoins? What kind of shovels do you think we’ll need in this gold rush? 

DIMITRI DADIOMOV: Yeah. I think at the end of the day we’ve heard for the past decade—15 years—about the promise of technology in crypto and stablecoins. I don’t think anybody doubts the technology works, I don’t think anybody doubts that this is something that has a use case and is better in a lot of situations, but I think that the adoption of it and getting a company to start adopting it for their corporate flows, for their treasury in-house, for their B2B payments, requires two things. 

One is social acceptance. So the finance manager in Kansas City might have to look at their risk committee and say, “I’m going to do this,” and for their team to allow them to do that. And the second is workflows. So from a UI perspective, from a usage perspective, how do they not have to think about it too hard? They need to obviously know they’re using a SWIFT wire, or stablecoin, or this, or that to do a borderless payment, but that’s not something that they need to really be thinking about actively, because that’s not their job. Their job is to basically manage liquidity for the company or to pay a certain vendor. 

And so I think in order for the really massive flows to move over onto stablecoin rails, you have to solve both of those things. And that’s a lot of what our focus is, is less about which specific flow, what specific payment or timing or whatever you’re trying to optimize for, but from a usage perspective, how do you actually access it? How do you connect to the right partners, banks, custody providers, what have you, and actually get the payment done without—by somebody who doesn’t really go to events like this and doesn’t really talk about crypto things all day? 

SHAN AGGARWAL: I think maybe a different way to say it is that you shouldn’t really think about a difference between a stablecoin and cash. Like for most of the businesses or people, they’re different in nomenclature and different in technology, but they should be functionally equivalent, right? And I think that’s sort of the North Star—is how do you basically get stablecoins to be treated as cash across all of these different dimensions? 

ERICA KHALILI: But I think that’s also where the way we’ve thought about it at Lead—and we’ve been in the digital assets sector since we acquired back in August of ’22—and it was a time when from a regulatory perspective that was really hard to do as a bank, and the quality bar and the patina that we had to have around clients in order to do this in a safe and sound way, because there was a regulatory narrative of doom and gloom for lack of a better word around the digital assets sector. And now you’ve seen that shift where I think when you’re thinking of—we keep going back to the Kansas City example, but the credentialization of having clear, crisp regulation and having policymakers embrace the technology kind of opens the aperture of what you can do. 

And it feels safe because right now, even if you don’t understand how ACH works or how SWIFT works, it’s been around, it’s tested, you believe that your money will be there. And so I think part of that is also the educational and the regulatory loop for the adoption in terms of making sure that people understand that these are assets, you should treat them as cash. 

And I remember the first time we had our regulators on-site and we were talking about digital assets. And they’re like, “What if you lose this or lose that?” I was like, “I live in New York.” And I said, “If I lose my wallet on the 6 train, I’m not getting that back either, let me tell you.” So making things more digestible I think is also key to broadening the adoption sector.

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: For the developers in the rooms that are probably getting excited about the technology, what is missing from the picture? What is needed for adoption to really pick up? What should people be building? 

ERICA KHALILI: I want clear, crisp regulations. So, I’m going to DC on Monday, but I think that—that’s I think, to my mind, yes, there’s the technology, there’s the continuing advancements. But I think a lot of the people in this room have that. And I think there’s becoming more of the mainstream discussion of these technologies and the utility thereof for the use cases like cross-border payments, like tokenization. And I think that that in and of itself starts a flywheel, and then once you get to know the technology—my father’s an immigrant, and so I started him when I was back at Block, like “Dad, why don’t you buy some Bitcoin like I do?”

And so him now starting to deal with that, he’s like “Oh, this isn’t all vaporware and used for criminals and stuff like that.” So it starts a flywheel of products and services that then become part of your everyday life. And I’ll steal a bit of language from the keynote today. People are adaptable. And so starting to have that in your everyday flows I think just makes it seem like this is money. It’s another permutation of money, but it’s money at the end of the day, whether it’s beads and goats on one side or digital assets on the other. They all have a utility and a purpose, and it’s just the adaptability of humanity. 

SHAN AGGARWAL: Yeah. I definitely agree with the importance of regulation. I think the other thing is there’s still way too much fragmentation across a lot of different dimensions that I think are just very difficult to conceptualize and manage individually. And so, if you’re dealing with stablecoins, there’s different types of stablecoins. Each of them might have slightly different reserve requirements or reserve banks. 

And so they’re not fully interchangeable, but they sort of look and feel interchangeable. You have to deal with different on and offramps across the world, different currencies—US dollars, Euros, GBP, etc.—and different custodians and underlying banks. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunities still for effectively a connectivity layer across all of these things, as well as the underlying on-chain wallets that are coordinating activity across different businesses and consumers. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah, I would agree. It’s connectivity and banking. And obviously, banks like Lead and others have done a lot of work on this. But when we were starting out, the most difficult thing on earth was just getting a bank account. I still remember we waltzed into a PNC in Auburn, Alabama, thinking we’re just going to go in there and open a bank account to sell Bitcoin in Nigeria. Turns out that raises red flags with bankers. 

ERICA KHALILI: Just to be clear, that would raise red flags with Lead, too. We would keep the conversation going, but I’d be like, “Let’s have a talk.”

CHRIS MAURICE: But I think the space has come a long way. And the technology has come a long way. The rails and all of that have come a long way. But there is still a lot of, how do you say, hesitancy from banking. And there are still—what—four or five banks realistically at this point that you can work with as a company in the sector, and anybody out of that isn’t really touching you, especially from a US perspective. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Yeah. And to your point, I think most of the adoption to date has been kind of behind the scenes, what Bridge has done and others, right? It’s essentially replacing workflows and payment flows with stablecoins without exposing it to customers or businesses just yet. So that’s still coming. 

Shifting gears a little bit, you’ve already hinted at the fragmentation. Fast forward to 2030, what does the market look like? Is it a replica of the card duopoly, or do we have dozens and dozens of these stablecoin assets, some are issued by institutional players, some by retail? What’s the industry like in five years? 

SHAN AGGARWAL: So my perspective is it’ll sort of evolve on two different dimensions, where you already have what I call ecosystem stablecoins that have meaningful distribution, meaningful liquidity, an established distribution network, because each of these, it is sort of developing an acceptance network, similar to credit cards back in the day. 

But I do think you’ll also see at the other end a very, very long tail of application or use case specific stablecoins. So the stablecoin doesn’t actually exist to see the light of day and be recognizable about individuals, but it’s a functional utility for an application. It serves a purpose, which is exchanging money from one place to the next. And I think you’ll see this segmentation, and you’re already starting to see it today with a lot of new issuers coming to market. 

I think that that will continue, it will actually quite frankly accelerate because the cost and difficulty of launching a stablecoin has come down pretty significantly, and it will only continue to come down. But I think you get a handful that reach this status as ecosystem stablecoins, and obviously we’re very hopeful that USDC ultimately ends up being one of those. 

DIMITRI DADIOMOV: I think to some degree success would be where it doesn’t matter. When you think about—we all know about cards, we know there’s Visa and Mastercard. There’s different types of wires, there’s CHIPS and Fedwire; but you don’t know about that, you don’t care about that. There’s two types of ACH, there’s FedACH and there’s TCH ACHs. But again, that’s like you have to be just a huge payments nerd to know about that and to care about that. As a user, you don’t really know about this. So I think that acceptance and adoption is where you say stablecoin, you say US dollars, you stop thinking about that as different assets and it’s just another form of payment. 

And you know that, and there’s enough proof in your past experience, in other companies paying you, etc., that you just know that it’ll get there, it’ll get there on time, it’s going to be reconciled easily. If there’s some edge cases and errors, the bank’s going to work with you on that and others, going to solve it. So I think that in some ways, talking about how many different types of coins and this and that are going to be involved in this is almost like a sign of the maturity of the market that we don’t yet, that we care about this still. And I think at some point that disappears and that, I think that’s going to be a really important moment for the industry. 

ERICA KHALILI: Yeah. I think there’s going to be a flood. It feels like now is the time where everyone feels like they also don’t want to get left behind. And the gold rush, I think, is the verbiage you use. But I think at the end, I would echo the utility and the use case of it is where everyone will issue them, and then there’ll be a flight to quality and utility that comes out of that which I think will be self-selecting in a lot of ways, and so much of that will come down to distribution. 

We’re very—I think everyone in the room is very aligned around the international use cases, and to me what’s the most exciting and what will lead to which ones actually stick and grow and thrive is the utility around them and how do they make sense domestically. How do they make sense internationally? What problem are they solving? And so that’s where abstracting away the “What coin is it?” and focusing on what the problem it solves is a little bit where I see the next 5–10 years going. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah. Distribution will win, which is why I think outside of a couple of core stablecoins that have been around for a little while and have some semblance of scale, a lot of this stuff is going to get eaten up by banks. Eventually banks will get into the space. They will all issue their own tokens. It essentially becomes tokenized deposits, right? And my JPMorgan Coin is going to be valuable to just about anybody, right? My Wells Fargo Coin is going to be valuable to just about anybody that trusts that that bank is actually holding those deposits. 

ERICA KHALILI: I feel some kind of way you didn’t say your Lead Bank Coin. 

CHRIS MAURICE: And the most valuable, of course, my Lead Bank Coin—which Lead Bank Coin is going to $1.50. That’s what I know. 

ERICA KHALILI: I’m buying Chris a drink after this one. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Very bullish on Lead Bank Coin. And so, yeah, I think once the banks really get involved, which again—look, most banks have been hesitant to get involved to date. And when they do, they’re all going to do it at once. These guys all operate on FOMO and they’re all going to be scared that they’re going to miss out on the other one. 

SHAN AGGARWAL: These guys. 

CHRIS MAURICE: These guys, except for Lead Bank, who is the one causing the FOMO, $2 now. And so I think, yeah, you’re going to see—to Dimitri’s point, you’re going to see banks all over the world, and especially all over the US, issuing their own sort of semblance of a stablecoin. And you will end up with some sort of system where it doesn’t matter, where it doesn’t matter what bank you’re on, it doesn’t matter what token you’re using. 

DIMITRI DADIOMOV: Yeah. If it does, it’s bad news. 

CHRIS MAURICE: A dollar is a dollar, right? Yeah, well, exactly. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: We seem to all agree that essentially this is going the way electricity went. At the beginning you had Edison bulbs and they were premium and you could show them off, and later you’re just what’s the cheapest to meter. And in that market, I think you raised a really important point, which is on one side you have the banks which are close to the metal and so will have very low cost issuing. On the other side, you have the entities with massive distribution, whether it’s a large digital platform or retailer or any other fintech. 

And what’s fascinating is that in that dichotomy, we really don’t know which way the market may go. Now, it may stay a lot more decentralized and distributed than it is today. It could also kind of recentralize if one player is really good at executing well. On that, I’d love to hear from you. Most new technology really thrives when it finds a breakthrough new killer app. And as much as I think we’re all excited about stablecoins being used for cross-border and enabling new types of lower cost payments, crypto has been struggling with this. 

Some say Bitcoin is the killer app, this completely new digital asset. But when it comes to stables, is there anything that you see on the horizon that only self-driving dollars on a blockchain where programmability can do that your system cannot replicate? Because I think that’s going to be quite important in that fight between the TradFi and the NewFi coming in. 

SHAN AGGARWAL: I think one that I’m pretty excited about is—it’s probably been a common topic of conversation here, though—is just allowing AI agents to make autonomous payments, whether that’s for data, compute, content, effectively in real time and at any transaction size. We believe that stablecoins are effectively the native payment rail for AI agents and agentic commerce. And the reason for that is legacy payment rails weren’t built for machine-to-machine commerce. It requires logins, API keys, credit cards, other forms of credentials, as well as minimum account payments. 

And so something that we actually just launched earlier this week is x402, which is a new open-source payment protocol that’s specifically enabled for this use case. And it allows AI agents to make a payment directly, without any type of API key or credit card or login, just deeply embedded into an API call. So I think those are the types of things that when we think about what programmable dollars create, it creates this virtuous flywheel of dollars that can fit maybe for different constituents beyond just businesses and consumers. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah, I agree with that fully. I think at the end of the day, AI agents and this next level and layer of technology make decisions rapidly in fractions of a second. And so, you need a technology that can keep up with that, and stablecoins are the only payment method that exists that can actually keep up with the speed that an AI agent and machine-to-machine commerce would operate at. 

DIMITRI DADIOMOV: Yeah. I think a big use case that people don’t talk about as much, I think, is the money market use case, respectively. When you think about stablecoins, you’re getting yield that you don’t, that you maybe should get, but you’re not getting in your checking account or what have you. And so I think that storing funds in a place where due to information asymmetry or laziness or what have you, you haven’t put funds into the right place to earn the maximum yield, stablecoins really make that a lot easier and kind of default into. It’s built into that the way the system works. 

Now one thing that’s kind of interesting when you think about that is a technology that is sort of present in the US—it’s very much present in other countries—around instant payments is something that you really have to have in order to get the funds out whenever you need them. So to the extent that you’re still transacting for commercial purposes in US dollars, you need to have something like RTP or FedNow. And that’s I think part of what you’re seeing in other geographies is the presence of these systems like Pix and others that allow companies to convert out of your money market funds, stablecoin sort of fund, into over the weekend 24/7, get the funds into your wallet so you can go spend it on something. 

And I think that combination becomes really powerful, and becomes really hard I think for a lot of the banking industry to fight, because ultimately it’s the right way to do it. And I think from an AI perspective, you start having to think about, okay, well, if the self-driving dollars go to the right place where they should be earning the most yield, how do they then get accessible over the weekend, how do they get accessible at night, what are the use cases, whether it’s payroll or payday loans or things like that where all of a sudden there is a difference between being able to have it on Saturday at noon versus Monday at 6:00 a.m. 

And so I think that the instant payment technology combined with storage, if you will, and stablecoins is something that’s a real enabler for this. 

ERICA KHALILI: I guess I’ll be honest. I don’t exactly know what it’s going to look like. And I think that’s what’s exciting about it, at least for me, is I’m not presupposing. I’m seeing these things evolve real-time. And I think that the use cases you’re talking about, about faster money movement, cheaper, more efficient—all of that with the programmable dollars and the abstraction layer of AI on top of that—I think we don’t even know yet where this is going to go in the next five years, and that’s what I think is really, really cool about it. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Just to pressure test that a little bit, because I think we’ve seen the major card network issue their own API and SDKs for AI agents, Stripe of course has its own development kit for this—there’s an alternative, so there are different solutions. Why does it have to be on a blockchain? Why does it need to be on stablecoins? 

ERICA KHALILI: I don’t know that it does. I think that that’s one use case for it that makes a lot of sense, but I think that you could build it on top of other rails. I just don’t think it would work as seamlessly and elegantly. 

DIMITRI DADIOMOV: Yeah. We spend a lot of time helping companies do things in a way that appears seamless and elegant, but oftentimes it’s not behind the scenes. So I think that at the end of the day, there is an advantage to being native, digital native in a way that you built it versus something that at the end of the day runs on infrastructure from the 1970s that’s sitting in a central location. 

And I think that, again, it’s a country-by-country thing. So I think one of the exciting things is can you actually have an abstraction that you don’t have to think about every country one-off? But yeah, for sure AI is going to affect all payment rails irrespective of what type of payment rail it is. 

CHRIS MAURICE: Yeah, I think there are a lot of fintech companies—and this is not specific to anybody that you mentioned—but there are a lot of fintech companies that haven’t necessarily solved a problem, in that what they’ve done is they’ve usurped a bunch of user’s problems. and it’s still a shitshow on the back end. 

They’re still dealing with legacy banking systems and legacy payment rails that don’t work. They’ve made it a really smooth interface for my mom, but the back end is still really messy, money movement and reconciliations and all this other stuff. And so stablecoins are the first technology that actually solve those problems, as opposed to again just putting a really smooth interface on it. 

And so I think at the end of the day, especially as this technology evolves around AI agents and things like that, you’re going to, how do you say, trend towards technology that actually solves those problems as opposed to just smooth interfaces with back ends. 

SHAN AGGARWAL: Yeah. I think if you think about, like, the development of consumer fintech over the last 10 years, 10 years ago there was the big rush towards neobanking. There was like a neobank every day. But they were largely nice interfaces that were packaged up on legacy infrastructure, and so that means there’s limitations in terms of what those neobanks can do, how quickly they can ship new products, and then also how regulated they are. 

And then I think over the last 5–7 years you basically have seen a lot of development on the back end, which is largely based on crypto rails, stablecoins, things of that nature. And then now you’re seeing a rebundling, and there’s this energy now around the stablecoin neobank. 

And it’s interesting because you see stablecoin neobanks, you can start a stablecoin neobank in just a couple months. It’s great—you use an embedded wallet provider like a Privy, use a stablecoin like USDC, and then you build a front-end app, and it’s great, global dollars. And then now, with Lead Bank and Bridge, you can issue a credit card directly out of that wallet. And so I think the velocity at which you can get consumer financial services to people everywhere around the world has accelerated significantly. And so to Erica’s point earlier, I think that’s a really exciting thing, is now what comes downstream of that. 

CHRISTIAN CATALINI: Well welcome to the age of modular finance. You entered at 402, which was an error code that many of you will not be familiar with. Most of you have encountered the 404, when you when the page isn’t working or found. 402 was meant to be payment required. Let’s truly hope that stablecoin can solve that and everything else. Thank you so much. Please join me in thanking the panelists.