MAI LEDUC BLOUNT: In March 2016, something pretty monumental happened. The Obama administration had authorized Airbnb to enable travelers to book stays in Cuba. 

I was working at Airbnb at the time and part of the team responsible for ensuring all hosts around the world got paid for welcoming guests into their homes. It was a big moment. It presented a huge economic opportunity for Cuban hosts and our team rallied around it, obviously super stoked. But we pretty quickly hit on one fundamental question: how exactly are we going to get money to hosts in Cuba? 

Even if there was local, reliable banking infrastructure, decades of sanctions meant that no US bank was integrated with them. Well, what was our answer to this problem? Bicycle couriers. Let me explain. So when we were searching for ways to get money into Cuba, we’d quickly realized that travel agents had been doing it all along. So we landed on a very elegant three-step solution involving a couple of intermediaries. 

We’d first wire money to a travel agency, who would then make the funds available via Cuban ATMs to a network of bicycle couriers to basically retrieve, and they were armed with a printout of an Excel spreadsheet that told them who, how much, and where to drop the money to. So we’re like high-fiving each other. We solved the problem of getting money to our Cuban hosts, who as you can imagine were elated at the opportunity to improve their livelihoods with an additional source of income. 

The downside? Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly instant, and cobbling all those intermediaries together also meant it wasn’t especially economical. Sometimes those bills would arrive a little sweaty, or sometimes, as you can imagine, were skimmed off the top. So, not exactly ideal. So it was a wild, wild situation, and it’s stuck with me ever since, because it’s highlighted one very fundamental question: Why shouldn’t we be able to pay someone instantly, easily, just because they happen to live in a country with less developed financial rails? 

And so then fast forward a couple of years, I found myself working at GoFundMe, focused on getting donations into the hands of people, as you can imagine, often in really challenging circumstances. And it reinforced another really hard truth about money movement at scale globally. Often, out of every dollar sent in international aid, only 40 cents actually makes it to the final destination. 

Now there’s a lot of conversation around administrative efficiency, but what people often forget is a simple brutal fact: just the act of sending money across borders is inefficient. Locally optimized or outdated systems, middle layers make it super costly and slow, and dollars disappear along the way. So the donations you and I make don’t often have the impact we intended them to. And again, I was struck by that same question: why is it still so hard, so expensive, to simply pay someone digitally around the globe? I spent my career in payments, and it’s still surprisingly and frustratingly hard to get money into people’s hands, especially if they don’t live in major markets like the US or EU.

And you’d think, in the age of the internet, we would have solved that problem. Banks, fintechs have tried to solve this for years. And to us here in the US, it feels like money has really evolved. Money management looks different than it did a decade ago. Banking-as-a-service has brought payments, lending, and account services to startups of all shapes and sizes, promising to solve consumers’ every financial problem. 

If you want to deal with money, you don’t have to go to a bank anymore, or even a bank’s website. You just go to a shinier website, or use a better interface, or better apps. Things feel more intuitive, more delightful. But I’ve grown more convinced that a lot of this innovation in the last couple of years has really occurred on the fringes. And oftentimes, it’s just lipstick on a pig. You know, a lot of new novel ideas, but not real transformation.

Same old problems, just repackaged. Antiquated, outdated systems—rails—still exist under the hood, they just look better to us. And those of us in markets with reliable infrastructure have never felt the gaps in the system in the way those Cuban hosts did. It’s a different reality for them. 

And more often than not, we’ve been trying to force old infrastructure to work in a new, interconnected world, and it’s just not cutting it. It can be slow, inefficient, outdated. We need something better. And this is where stablecoins come in. They’re more than just the status quo wrapped up. They truly represent new infrastructure, an entirely new option for global money movement, a better way to move value, and one that I personally feel tackles the problem I faced trying to solve seamless global money movement every day at Airbnb and GoFundMe. 

And as with any transformative infrastructure, we’re seeing adoption skyrocket. $238 billion stablecoins are currently in circulation, and that’s up more than 2x from last year. And we’re seeing daily transactions ticking up. 

There’s vast, untapped, acute demand for fast, cheap, and borderless money movement. And that’s exactly what stablecoins promise. They’re faster, settling in seconds, not days; cheaper, costing cents, not significant percentages; borderless, built on decentralized networks, accessible from anywhere and by anyone. So no more travel agents, no more sweat, no more missing funds for those that need it the most. 

So you might ask: stablecoins have been around for almost 10 years, why haven’t they completely revolutionized how we send money yet? Part of it is awareness, and part of it is trust. But demand has also grown for geopolitical reasons. Borderless commerce grew as the world went inside and online during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Inflationary pressures in a number of countries have led to an increased interest in stable dollar-backed assets. Even so, they still weren’t easy for businesses and companies to actually integrate and use. The raw technology was powerful, but harnessing it felt so out of reach. That’s changing. Bridge is removing those barriers and transforming powerful stablecoin tech into tools that anyone can use. 

We’ve made it our mission to provide simple APIs with robust and reliable infrastructure that fintechs, financial institutions, and companies of all shapes and sizes can use to create what they need on top of stablecoin rails without really having to think about them. So it’s not the “what” that has fundamentally changed in the last year or two—stablecoins have always been faster and cheaper for global money movement. It’s the “how”—the easy, out-of-the-box use of stablecoins. 

And by making stablecoins use simple, we’ve been floored at what it’s unleashed, a perfect storm of creativity. I’m humbled every day to witness our global users combining these building blocks in ways we’ve never even imagined, and really building things that didn’t seem possible just a short time ago. It’s pretty impressive, and to be honest, pretty awe-inspiring. 

So that’s what I like to dig deeper on today. Here at Bridge, we’ve built composable APIs to simplify global payments, give access to digital dollars, and issue cards worldwide, all powered seamlessly by stablecoins. I’ll start by giving you a few real-world examples of how companies are using Bridge today. 

First, stablecoins are powering cross-border money movement and treasury management. Looking at Bitso, one of the largest exchanges in Latin America, they use Bridge to allow businesses to seamlessly move funds between their bank accounts in Mexico and the US, reducing FX costs and settlement times to minutes, not days. This directly replaces slow, expensive flows like legacy SWIFT payments. 

Or take Dakota. They’re on a mission to modernize the bank account itself with stablecoin infrastructure. They leverage Bridge’s APIs to issue their own secure stablecoin, fully treasury-backed for their clients around the world to store, transfer, and manage funds securely and efficiently, all without traditional fees. That’s a modern banking experience enabled by stablecoins entirely distinct from traditional finance. Fast, secure, programmable, built for today’s modern economy.

Two, stablecoins unlock inclusion at scale. So, today, millions earn their livelihoods remotely, digitally, across borders. But getting paid isn’t always the challenge, it’s accessing those earnings in a secure, scalable, stable, and reliable way. That’s the problem DolarApp solves. Using Bridge’s APIs, Dolar helps workers across Latin America receive earnings in stablecoins and store them securely. 

No banks or conversions needed, no more costly fees, no currency swings, no delayed payments, just instant access to digital dollars that hold their value. Airtm also leverages Bridge’s APIs to pay people across the world, in countries like Mexico, Nigeria, India, Argentina, with stable digital currencies from global employers like Scale.ai and many others. Their end users gain peace of mind. They know their earnings are safe from local inflation and volatility, and just as secure as if they had access to a stable banking system abroad. 

This is more than payments. This is about dignity and control for people in unstable economies to protect what they earn, build real financial security, and take part equally in the global economy. And now, with Bridge’s and Visa’s partnership, spending stablecoins just got a lot easier. Take Fuse Wallet, for example. Fuse Wallet is a finance app built for the digital economy, serving global entrepreneurs, digital nomads, and remote workers who can earn, trade, and move funds.

And they needed a simple way to spend their digital dollars in everyday spend. Fuse integrated Bridge’s card APIs to launch Visa-powered cards, and now their users can spend stablecoins directly online, in-store, and globally. No delays, no surprise fees, just seamless everyday access. Real-time spending straight from digital earnings. 

So, with one integration, Fuse turned stablecoin earnings into a complete global financial solution. Again, real-world spending, real-time money movement, powered by Bridge and stablecoins. So I just shared a couple of examples that just scratched the surface. Now let’s move from use cases to demo. 

I’d love to walk you through Bridge and how we make it easy to build with stablecoins using our APIs so you can see that in action and imagine what’s possible for your businesses. Let’s dive in. This is Vestra, a fictional neobank built entirely on Bridge’s platform. So, in this walkthrough, you’ll see how Vestra can onboard new users, issue dollar-based wallets, move funds across fiat and crypto, offer cards, and fast global payouts. 

No more legacy bank integrations needed. No global, regulatorily complex laws to manage. Just stablecoin-native infra doing what it’s built to do: making money move at the speed of the Internet. So let’s get into it. First up, user onboarding. Traditionally that meant building KYC and sanction checks yourself, a real heavy lift across many jurisdictions. 

With Bridge, it’s all handled for you, so you can stay focused on product and not compliance. One API call handles it all: ID checks and full compliance, even manual reviews if needed. No risk systems to build from scratch, no regulatory blind spots to watch. Just pass us the right info and Vestra’s users are ready to go. Vestra can then create a wallet via Bridge. 

It’s dollar-denominated by default, ready to receive and manage funds across fiat and crypto rails. Next up, let’s fund the wallet. Vestra’s users can fund in two ways. First, via their virtual account. Using ACH, WIRE, or SEPA rails, funds are then auto-converted to stablecoins on arrival and deposited into the wallet. Or they can send stablecoins to their blockchain wallet address from any compatible platform. 

Bridge will handle it behind the scenes. Funds can come from many chains as well; to name a few: Ethereum, Base, Solana, Polygon. And funds settle instantly into one stable balance. And this setup gives users flexibility, whether they use bank and fiat rails or crypto platforms to fund. Vestra meets them where they are with one seamless experience. 

This especially matters for global platforms operating in real high-adoption markets. An interesting fact: in 2023, over half of consumers in Latin America used crypto to make at least one payment. That’s real mainstream usage. And especially in Latin America, many users are more likely to hold Bitcoin than access stable USD or bank rails. And with Bridge, Vestra can accept Bitcoin alongside stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, PYUSD. 

So we’re giving users flexible funding options. Vestra can also choose to use USDB, a fully backed stablecoin by Bridge, designed to support rewards programs. Simple to integrate, easy to manage, and it offers added utility and branding for platforms that want more control. Now that the wallet is funded, Vestra doesn’t need to offramp, so there’s no local currency conversion required.

Stablecoin balance. The user then can add their card to their phone and can spend it instantly, almost anywhere Visa is accepted, whether that’s in-store, online, or globally. So it’s a familiar UX, but under the hood powered by stablecoins. Simple, seamless, spendable. 

And from a merchant’s point of view, it just looks like a normal debit transaction. But behind the scenes, the user is spending stablecoins directly. And Bridge handles that conversion instantly at the time of each purchase. This is a big unlock for stablecoins. It removes friction from spending, and it brings digital dollars into daily life. 

No more offramps, no platform switching, all just within the same Bridge platform, from funding to storage to spend. And especially in regions with volatile currencies or where cards are really hard to access, like parts of Africa, this matters more. Stablecoins give users control, letting them store value safely and spend when they actually need to. 

So no reliance on their local banks, no need to pre-convert currencies. It’s flexible, real-time access to stable value on their terms. That’s huge. But what if a user wants fiat? Maybe they want to take that out into their own bank account or to send money to someone else. Vestra can support offramping, too, directly from the same wallet. Stablecoins in, fiat out, simple. 

All the user has to do is link a bank account and initiate a withdrawal. Behind the scenes, Bridge steps in. We generate a blockchain address, receive the stablecoins, liquidate them, and send fiat via our supported rails, all handled end-to-end. Can you imagine this kind of flow and what it can power? For everything from global remittance apps to cross-border vendor payments. 

All the sender does and sees is a simple experience. The recipient gets fiat into their account and stablecoins move value in the middle, all of it orchestrated by Bridge. So in the last few minutes, we walked through what Vestra can do using Bridge’s APIs end-to-end, accepting fiat and crypto deposits, holding balances and stablecoins, spending via cards, sending payouts, all to deliver access to these new tools. 

And this is about delivering on the promise of a new, improved way for moving money, one that scales on top of what exists, not apart from it. Stablecoins are a layer, not a silo, bridging old rails with new tools. It’s unlocking doors to new business models and really creative ideas. 

Things that once seemed impossible or too costly are now within reach. And here at Bridge, we’re excited to help and bring those ideas to life. Thanks so much for being here.