ASTA LI: Hi everyone. I’m Asta. I’m the CTO and cofounder at Privy. We build digital asset accounts: think crypto wallets for Stripe and our customer base of more than 2,000 companies. At our core, we are an infrastructure company. We make it possible for developers to embed financial experiences directly inside their product. Users can now hold, move, and program money directly within apps without going somewhere else. And we do this all with stablecoin rails. So today I want to show you three things. First, how the financial infrastructure of the web is changing. What stablecoins unlock that traditional systems couldn’t. Second, what this looks like in practice. A live demo with real money onchain. And third, I’m thrilled to have one of our amazing customers, Ramp, join us onstage to share how they’re building on this stack.

First, let’s talk about how web infrastructure is changing. At Privy, we build directly with our customers. Every fintech I talk to, everyone who’s touching funds—whether you’re doing remittances, bill pay, contractor payouts, corporate cards—is noticing the same thing. When your user wants to use the money that flows through your product, buy something, hold a balance, pay a bill, they have to leave your app. If you’re a marketplace, your user gets paid through your platform, but they can’t use their funds without waiting for a transfer and logging into a third-party payment provider or bank. If your user wants to connect to the wider financial ecosystem, the only way to do that right now is to leave. This handoff creates fragmentation, it causes drop-off, it moves your user elsewhere. We can do better.

When platforms figure out how to enable value directly within their app, everything changes. Starbucks Rewards members who load funds into an in-app balance and spend from it are more than five times as likely to visit daily compared to nonmembers and drive the majority of US revenue. What stands out is that Starbucks owns the full loop, from funding to spend. When money lives inside the product, it creates a flywheel, more usage, more value, and a better experience for users directly within your product. In order to build better products, every fintech moves in the same direction—towards becoming a bank, a super app, or both. Most apps can’t offer this yet, or it’s too hard because the infrastructure the industry was built on wasn’t designed for it. That’s exactly what’s changing.

With stablecoin infrastructure, you can keep the entire experience in one place. Your users can hold money, move it, spend it, and get more from your product without having to leave. So holding value is possible with traditional rails, but it’s a major undertaking, especially for global reach. We’re talking years of work, a large cross-functional team, and the painstaking process of acquiring licenses one state at a time. Not to mention tackling foreign exchange, boots-on-the-ground partnerships, and everything in between. For example, Venmo was founded in 2009, but only launched international payments last month. So this is a hard problem.

And all of that changes with stablecoins. They give you global reach on day one, near instant settlement, and the ability to move money programmatically without waiting on legacy systems. And that’s what we enable with Privy. You can think of Privy like a money account in a box, a powerful API that lets you embed financial services and money capabilities directly inside your product. It’s modular. You turn on the pieces that your product needs. And with just a few lines of code, you can provision an account that holds balances. You can generate rewards, so users earn on their balances. You can issue debit and credit cards. So when your user grabs a coffee, it draws directly from the balance that they hold in-app. You can enable payouts, transfers, onramps, offramps, all in one place. All of it powered with stablecoins under the hood. All of it, a seamless experience directly within your app.

Now let me show you what this actually looks like. I’m going to demo four things: how you can use stablecoin rails to store funds in-app, spend from a balance, send globally, and earn rewards on your balance. All with real money, US dollar stablecoin on Tempo, and all built in just three days by a single engineer on our team using Bridge, Privy, and Stripe Crypto APIs.

So this is what the world is used to today. I’m Sam. I’m a delivery driver for an app called Smash. I’ve earned about $400 from my deliveries, but I can’t use any of it. Instead, I have to wait for my next payout, which is next month, May 15th. And not only that, when I trigger payouts, the ACH takes up to three business days to process and settle in my account. Now I want to show you what we get to build on stablecoin rails. So this is Smash, but it isn’t just a delivery app anymore. It’s a fintech super app with full money account capabilities. It does everything it used to, shows me how much I earned, lets me transfer to a bank account. By the way, this is built using Bridge APIs and cashes out to a real Wells Fargo bank account.

And it also lets me spend funds directly from a debit card. This is a Visa debit card, and I’ve loaded this card onto Apple Pay, so that I can spend via Apple Pay directly from my in-app balance. Let me show you. So I’m going to charge myself a coffee on this terminal—and approved. So you can see here, this latest transaction is the coffee that I just bought from our cafe station. And I can send money to anyone in the world instantly, even before they’re onboarded. So I’m going to send $10 to our guest from Ramp, Andrew, who isn’t on Smash app yet.

And when Andrew logs into Smash, he’ll see the money has already arrived and settled into his account. It’s ready to spend. Debit cards and instant payouts, Stripe already makes those possible. But here’s some things you might have never seen before. By integrating Privy wallets, Smash lets me earn rewards on my balance through digital asset vaults. I’ve transferred $100 into a savings account, where it’s earning a little over 4% APY. And we’re making balances spendable directly from vaults too, which means I get to earn rewards on my balance up until the second I swipe my card.

This is pretty special, even in the United States, but for users in countries with less stable currencies and lower earnings rates, it’s spectacular. Users around the world now have easy access to high rewards accounts with stable dollar denominated balances. And here’s the kicker: Smash developers only have to build this app once, and they get to launch in every country around the world on day one. Everything you just saw works the same, whether your users are in the US, Latin America, or Southeast Asia—same infrastructure, same experience. Stripe Crypto, Bridge, and Privy handle the blockchain complexity. What your developers see is a simple API, and what your users see is a financial experience that just works.

Companies like Ramp, Klarna, and Deel are using this infrastructure to move faster, launching in new markets without rebuilding their stack, embedding financial products directly into their apps, and they’re delivering real value to users in ways that weren’t possible before. And with that, I’m so excited for Andrew Chapello to join us onstage. Andrew is the product lead for payments, monetization, and stablecoins at Ramp. He’s building on this stablecoin stack for 50,000-plus businesses right now. Welcome up, Andrew. All right, Andrew. So tell us a bit about Ramp. What does Ramp enable, and what are you focused on as a part of that mission?

ANDREW CHAPELLO: First of all, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Ramp is a financial automation platform. We work with customers around the world to save them time and money by automating their financial transactions that they do every month. And we do that through cards, through bill pay, through treasury solutions, and we enable them to focus on higher-value tasks than what finance teams have been able to do in the past.

ASTA LI: Makes sense. So yeah, finance, bill pay, and so on—sounds like Ramp already offers a huge product suite, but you guys built this on traditional rails. So, tell me, Ramp has been clear that traditional rails aren’t good enough and you’re making huge investments into the stablecoin stack. So what specifically wasn’t good enough? And when did stablecoins go from interesting to we have to build with this?

ANDREW CHAPELLO: We’re always thinking about how we can deliver new and exciting solutions for our customers. We started primarily serving businesses in the US, and as we began to serve larger businesses and businesses around the world—we operate in about 190 countries with our customers’ employees today—we found problems that we just couldn’t quite get over as we wanted to send payments to different geographies, finding that to take a very long time, sometimes 7 to 15 days to be able to send a payment between countries. We weren’t able to get certainty on fees or a fee structure that we felt like was fair to our customers, and we ran into bespoke compliance requirements that were difficult to work around or weren’t aligned with the user experience that we wanted to provide. And so we constantly ask ourselves, “Are there things we can be doing to make this better? Is there a new solution? Is there a new technology on which we can build?”

And we’ve really been really excited about stablecoins for the possibility to be able to remove some of these customer problems that we’ve seen, to be able to, as you say, be able to send money anywhere in the world, near instantly, 24 by 7, with very low fees. That was really exciting to us. And that’s when we started to dig in, when we saw that it could solve that customer pain.

ASTA LI: Yeah, that’s amazing. And that’s exactly what you’ve done with the newest addition to the Ramp product suite, Ramp Stablecoin Accounts. Tell us a bit about Stablecoin Accounts.

ANDREW CHAPELLO: Yeah. Stablecoin Accounts allow Ramp customers to be able to hold stablecoins within a wallet, that within Ramp Treasury. They can turn their dollars or their fiat currency into stablecoins. They can earn rewards on that balance, and they can be able to pay their counterparties—whether that’s their employees or their vendors—in fiat currency or in stablecoins. It sounds really simple. It was harder to build out the infrastructure. Really what that provides our customers is the ability to be able to pay customers the way that they… I’m sorry, pay vendors and employees the way that they want to be paid. We had customers who wanted to pay their employees and vendors in countries that may not have a stable fiat currency, that may not have the type of liquidity that they needed to be able to get paid the way that they wanted to, or customers that were not able to be served by traditional banking systems. And we’re able to give them this solution to be able to hold money and send it anywhere in the world, and have found it to be getting a lot of great adoption.

ASTA LI: Yeah, that’s so exciting. So yeah, global accounts, balances, payments anywhere in the world, also rewards, and so on. That’s really exciting. Can you tell us how it’s built? What does the stack look like and how does Privy play a role?

ANDREW CHAPELLO: We have a product called Ramp Treasury that allows you to hold money. Essentially, this is giving customers access to a Privy wallet, which can hold US dollar-backed stablecoins. We work with a number of different chains and different asset types through our partnership with Bridge and Stripe as well. Customers can deposit their funds in either US dollars or in US dollar-backed stablecoins into this account, and then use that to essentially orchestrate payments around the world. And a lot of our goal in doing this was to be able to bring better connectivity between the fiat and stablecoin ecosystems. And that’s why we’re so excited to be working with you all in Privy and Stripe and Bridge in that your APIs make this seamless for us. One of our design imperatives was in abstracting away crypto terminology and specific nuances that we didn’t feel like our customers needed to worry about.

What we want them to know is that they’re holding dollar equivalence and that they’re able to use that to make payments around the world in a secure and compliant way. And we’ve really sort of pushed those design boundaries with the help of Privy in making that happen. And so, you ask a little bit about the stack. We work with Bridge for payment orchestration, Privy for wallets, Stripe for some payment methods and cards as well.

ASTA LI: Amazing. Well, in putting together the stack and your attention to the approachability of the product and so on, what were some of the details? What were tough product calls or places where you really paid a lot of attention?

ANDREW CHAPELLO: We’ve built our product over the last seven years to work around some of the nuances of the global financial system. One thing that we ran into as we began to work with these new financial tools were that we needed to unwind some of the assumptions that we had made before. For example, banks close around 5:00 pm. With crypto, you can pay people at 11:00 pm. You can pay 24 by 7 by 365. And so we needed to look at all of the decisions that we had made along the way and decide how we were going to unwind some of those and where we could make things simpler for our customers. We pushed all of those boundaries and tried wherever possible to make it easier to understand, to remove complexity. And so, sometimes that means using stablecoins to make transactions as infrastructure, where a customer doesn’t need to care that they’re involved in that transaction. So, it was really about how do we make this new technology very approachable and focus on the customer problem to be solved, which is in storing value and sending it where it needs to go.

ASTA LI: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s clear to me how much you value building that approachable experience, meeting users where they are. And a big part of meeting users where they are is also interop. I saw on Twitter recently that your team did something kind of wild. You funded a paper check with USDC. Tell us about that.

ANDREW CHAPELLO: This is a really fun example of a core principle that we have, which is that customers should view stablecoins as money. They should view it the same way as they view dollars, as they view euros. It’s another form of money. And so with Stablecoin Accounts, you can pay your vendors using any payment method that we support on Ramp. We support wire transfers, ACH. We can work with the SWIFT network. We don’t think that anyone had ever made the particular transaction before of storing money in stablecoins and then funding a paper check, but we work with a customer whom we love, who runs an almond farm in Northern California, and he wants to store his treasury in stablecoins. And so we let him do that and we let him pay fund checks in order to pay his vendors, in order to order equipment, in order to order seeds, and that lets us create the type of experience that he was looking for that frankly didn’t exist before.

ASTA LI: Wow, that is so cool. All right. Last question. It’s 2028. Stablecoin infrastructure is boring. It just works. What does a typical Ramp customer’s financial stack look like, and what can they do that would be impossible today?

ANDREW CHAPELLO: I love thinking about this. At Ramp, we’re really focused on automating the rote financial tasks that finance teams have been working on for generations. I think we’re going to see, increasingly, Ramp doing more work for you. We just launched procurement agents yesterday, which help you be able to select vendors in a much more easy and seamless way than you can today. We’re building bill pay agents, we’re building policy agents. And the reason I mentioned that is I think what we’re most of all trying to do is in allowing your employees to be able to move from doing more rote everyday work into more strategic work. And we’ve used stablecoins as infrastructure that can more easily move money around the world and then can plug in to the automation and agentic work that we’re building in order to make money move around the world easier.

And so you ask about the stack. We don’t think our customers should need to care that much about the stack that they’re using. They should care more about, “How can this help me run my business more efficiently? How can it help me get time back, save money, and make my business more profitable?”

ASTA LI: That makes a lot of sense. I’m excited for that. Thank you so much, Andrew. This is a room full of product builders. Your products all touch value in some way. You’re moving money, managing balances, processing payments. The opportunity is to give your users the financial features that they’re looking for directly in-app, on infrastructure that’s faster, more global, and more flexible than ever before. Value can live in your app. Your users can hold it, move it, spend it without ever leaving. That’s what’s possible now.