JOHN EGAN: Okay, last year at Sessions, we brought crypto back to Stripe. And this year, you’ve probably noticed that stablecoins are having a moment. And not just because really anything in today’s economy seems pretty great when it’s a little bit more stable, but what we’ve seen is global stablecoin issuing volume double in the last year to almost a quarter trillion dollars. They’re being rapidly adopted all over the globe. 

So in Brazil, for example, we’re seeing 90% of crypto transactions are now stablecoin transactions. Meanwhile in Turkey, dollar-backed stablecoin transactions now represent more than 4% of the country’s GDP. In Africa, fintechs built on stablecoin infrastructure are exploding all across the continent. And overall, there’s been $5.7 trillion in adjusted transaction volume across stablecoins in 2024. This is up 54% from 2023. 

So what’s making stablecoins so successful, especially in these emerging markets? Well, they’ve got four unique properties that really set them apart. Number one, they make money movement faster. Number two, they make that money movement cheaper. Number three, they’re open-access and decentralized, and that means they get to be global by default. And number four, they’re inherently programmable. So in large swaths of the world, especially where currencies are considerably more volatile, having dollar-backed assets serve as the backbone of the local economy has become immensely valuable. 

Let’s take remittances. Immigrants send over a trillion dollars a year back to their families. But according to the World Bank, they’re paying an average of 6.4% to do it. That’s a lot of money that’s not making its way to where it’s meant to go. And worst of all, it can take days or weeks for the money to actually get there, no matter how urgently it’s needed. In comparison, with stablecoins the fees can be pennies, they transfer instantly, and they work globally. Can you imagine putting $64 billion back into the economy every year? 

But many of you in this room probably run businesses in the US, in the UK, in other much more developed countries, and you have sophisticated financial systems and a pretty stable currency system to build on. Nevertheless, we still think that you should be running for the door to put together your stablecoin roadmap, and here’s why. 

First of all, building financial services globally is no small task. We know, we’ve been doing it at Stripe for the last 13 years. Financial institutions and infrastructures, it’s all highly siloed. In the US, residents bank with US institutions. In Mexico, residents bank with banks in Mexico. And that makes launching multiple countries riddled with obstacles for companies. Companies have to go country by country, opening legal entities, establishing banking partnerships, acquiring regulatory licenses. Even if you’re the most capable fintech, this roadmap is going to look like years, if not decades, to execute a truly global product launch. 

But stablecoins offer programmable infrastructure that’s global from the first day. You can use them as a financial building block where one integration can unlock customers in dozens of countries. Bridge, a company we acquired earlier this year, has a full suite of APIs that can help businesses do just that. And that means companies like Cleva and Chipper in Nigeria, DolarApp in Mexico, and Airtm in Argentina, who we’ll be speaking with in just a minute, are all using Bridge APIs to operate stablecoin-backed financial services in dozens of countries. And not only that, but they did those integrations in just a matter of weeks. 

And then we’ve got a company like Ramp. Ramp is using Bridge to help them scale their card-issuing business to new markets all over the world. Stripe, we’re building with Bridge, too. Yesterday, we announced that we’re using Bridge to launch Stablecoin Financial Accounts in over 100 countries on the first day. 

Beyond financial services, stablecoins help just about any company in the world expand their reach. Accessing new markets should be just about as easy as flipping a switch. Today for traditional currencies, it’s really just not that simple. You have to hook up a local payment method, you’ve got to handle all the FX exposure, and you’ve got to manage the intricacies of a multi-currency business. So every company has to do this terrible calculus. You have to go country by country, and you have to figure out if it’s really worth it to open up your business there. But stablecoins make that decision easy. We’ve integrated stablecoins directly into Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, and you can start accepting payments all around the world with just a couple of lines of code. 

But you might be wondering, is there actual demand for stablecoin payments? Well, good news, the data says yes. Within a week of turning on stablecoins last year, we saw transactions pour in from over 30 countries. And we processed more stablecoin transactions in that week than we did in an entire year and a half with Bitcoin back in 2015. Today, we’re accepting stablecoin payments from over 100 countries. In fact, when X turned stablecoin payments on, they saw international customers choosing to pay their largest invoices with stablecoins instead of the traditional credit cards or bank networks. It’s a trend we’re seeing mirrored in AI companies like Text and Shadeform. 

So once you’ve acquired these customers in multiple countries, now you face the reality of managing a global treasury if you’re operating in the traditional currency space. And what currencies you’re holding on any given day, you’ve got to track that super closely. How do you easily transfer those currencies between your entities? How can you minimize foreign exchange fees? In sophisticated companies, you’ve got entire departments to handle this stuff. But for startups, they can just cripple your business with sunk cost and time. So with stablecoins, companies can more easily reconcile global ledgers, navigate changing currency landscapes, and simplify their overall operations. It dramatically reduces the complexity of managing any global treasury function. And best of all, you can do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not just when the banks are open. 

Let’s take Félix Pago. They’re a platform to send money via WhatsApp. They use Bridge to simplify their operations by moving unused working capital into Bridge’s own stablecoin. And then they get to earn rewards on that balance, which allows them to boost margins. 

But operating a business across borders doesn’t just stop at selling or treasury management. You’re also looking as a business all across the globe to hire talent and procure services from the people who are best suited to do the job, not just the people that are local to your business. So last year, Stripe expanded its ability for businesses to pay out in stablecoins too, whether that’s a global marketplace paying out earnings for goods sold by sellers in different countries or a US entity hiring a creative agency in the Philippines. Stablecoins allow them to pay out faster and without complicated FX. Remote, a global HR platform, uses Stripe to offer customers the ability to pay contractors directly in USDC, and they can do it instantly across 68 countries. They’ve seen quick and rapid adoption of this. It’s growing almost 2x every month. 

Okay, so let’s recap. Stablecoins present a paradigm shift in how money is moved around the globe thanks to being fast, inexpensive, open-access and global, and programmable. Okay, so what does this mean for you? This means you can build products and services that are global from the first day. It means you can win customers from all around the globe. You can efficiently manage your global treasury 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you can pay out to anyone globally instantly. As John said in the Future of Commerce keynote, there really isn’t any global business who wouldn’t benefit from this kind of technology. And those businesses are coming to us at Stripe every day with new problems that they’d like us to solve with stablecoins. 

So with that, I’m going to invite up our panelists on stage. Airtm, Ripple, and Ramp, they’re all building with stablecoins today. And to moderate the panel, please welcome Zach Abrams, co-founder and CEO of Bridge. 

MONICA LONG: Thank you. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: For sure.

MONICA LONG: So kind. Thank you. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Hey, everyone. Very, very excited to be here, and thank you for coming to the very last panel of Stripe Sessions. I’m here with Ruben, who is the co-founder and CEO of Airtm. They’ve been building in and around the stablecoin space for about 10 years now. Monica, who’s the President of Ripple—they started building cross-border payments on top of blockchain rails before stablecoins even existed. And Subham, who leads product and product marketing at Ramp, and is the most recent convert to stablecoins with the partnership that we launched, the card partnership that just launched the other day. Maybe just to get us started: Monica, you’ve been in the space longer than pretty much anyone, and very curious to hear how this space has evolved from when you first started to today. 

MONICA LONG: Ruben and I were having a moment in the audience watching John’s keynote, and he nudged me and goes, “Look at that. Stablecoins is kind of the future story. It only took 10 years.” It took long enough. And I think, I mean, everything that you saw in John’s presentation is true. Like, you know, Ripple became a company from the creation of the first alt chain to the Bitcoin blockchain, something called the XRP Ledger, which had a decentralized exchange built into it. So the thesis behind this new blockchain was always that it could be a global rail for payments. And that was obvious from day one, the value was. Global rail from out of the box, instant, really low-cost payments anywhere in the world. And it was a peer-to-peer network. 

But the challenge, what’s taken so long, is connecting the blockchains to the local rails, because you need the customer experience to work anywhere for anyone, money in, money out. And really, a lot of what we’ve been doing the past 10 years has been around regulatory relations, because the key to being operational is to get those banking partnerships and relationships, and that really depends on the country you’re working in, and who the regulators are, and what their outlook is. 

So I would contrast our experience building a global network. You know, a couple years ago, pretty infamously the US was known as having something, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, kind of like something people on the ground talked about, but I don’t know that that was really recognized formally. 

ZACH ABRAMS: I think now it is. 

MONICA LONG: Yeah. I mean, it was pretty odd. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Not a conspiracy. 

MONICA LONG: In March of ’23, I think it was, yeah, Silvergate and Signature Banks both kind of went down following SVB’s crash. 

ZACK ABRAMS: They were our bank partners, our first bank partners, first Signature, then Silvergate. Then we worked with SVB, so we kind of struck out. 

MONICA LONG: Yeah, three strikes and you’re out. And it was a crisis, was it not, Zach? 

ZACH ABRAMS: It was, we had to rebuild quite a few times. 

MONICA LONG: Yes, yes, and you contrast that situation with—which by the way, it’s gotten a lot, it’s night and day different in the US now—but like a country like Singapore, where MAS created a clear regulatory framework for it to get licensed and to be operational as a digital payment token business. And banks like DBS and Standard Chartered, like the soundest, largest banks in the region, would bank companies like ours. So I think that has been probably the biggest lesson learned. 

And then I would just couple that with, we started with the premise of, we will be only a software provider. We’re going to do global money movement without getting licensed or being in the flow of funds, because that sounds like it stinks. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Everybody wants to be Visa. 

MONICA LONG: I know. Yes, so enviable. But, yeah, I mean, I think over time we just realized, like, the more intermediaries you’re adding to the mix in order to fill those gaps, you’re really sacrificing the customer experience. You’re adding more bloat where, like, the beauty of blockchain is that fast, free experience. So, yes, we are with a kit of 60 licenses and growing. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Wow. Wow. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Yeah. Sixty licenses. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah, you’ll be there one day too, Ruben. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: I’m falling behind. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And so Ruben, what about you? You started 10 years ago. What pulled you towards stablecoins? 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: You know, we really sort of got to stablecoins I guess by chance and I guess destiny; we had to find stablecoins. From the beginning we were very aware of the challenges people faced when constrained by a closed-loop money network. Maybe it was money in the closed-loop money network of Venezuela and people trying to leave it, then people struggling with money that they got paid on the closed-money network of PayPal, that we then realized that open money was the best way to help people, you know, get access to better payment services. 

When you get paid and you’re a freelancer in Venezuela and you want to cash out that payment into local currency, and you get paid via PayPal, maybe it’s been 10 years since you get paid via PayPal more, you can’t really do much with that money. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And before you started, was everyone getting paid via PayPal? 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Yeah, and still is. PayPal processes a trillion-and-a-half-million dollars to payouts to people throughout the global south, and people get stuck with that money. They can’t really use it to pay their groceries or rent, whatever. And we think that if people had money that’s like cash they could take outside of PayPal to use for whatever, they wouldn’t have to pay PayPal’s very expensive commissions to cash out. That’s why we believe that the next iteration of PayPal has to be one that’s based on open money where it’s fine if Airtm doesn’t have the best cashout rails for your money. You could just take that cash and pay your landlord, your kid’s school, whatever. Yeah, and we think that that’s just a better experience. 

But of course, we're all sort of trying to figure out how to give people throughout the world access to redeemability, stablecoins to local currency. And I guess that’s the next frontier. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And how did that start for you when you were first, you know, 10 years ago or whatever, you were trying to get stablecoins to folks in Venezuela or folks in Argentina or Mexico—how did you do it? 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Well, it was first our own internal version of a stablecoin. It lived in an internal ledger. And it was actually just money, dollars that were redeemable for Bitcoin. And so we gave people access to Bitcoin that they could sell for dollars within our own ledger. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Got it. The original Tether. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: And they could basically get the benefits of Bitcoin, which is you could take it everywhere, to your own bank. It’s open, meaning the exchanges that people could trade Bitcoin for local currency are the free market rates. And then we sort of wrapped a dollar on it. And that’s how people got, I guess, some of the first stablecoins. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah. And so you kind of, you started off with the first version of a digital asset, the most popular one, which is Bitcoin. But you had to sort of convolute it to make it into a form that they felt that worked for them, which was a US dollar. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Yeah.

ZACH ABRAMS: Interesting. And so what about Ramp? Ramp has sort of been quite successful building on the existing fiat rails, and why stablecoins? 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: I love analogies so I’ll try to draw off an analogy. Last year, as a part of the mandate that I have at Ramp, Ramp has been trying to get more and more and more international because our businesses are pretty global. Over the course of 2024, there was a stark realization as we were expanding globally that trying to build on legacy financial rails was the equivalent of trying to run Netflix on dial-up, and you need broadband. And I think for us, it didn’t start with a love for stablecoins, which was the case for the two of you, but it really started from a point of a lot of customer friction that we were running into constantly with existing traditional rails. So what that means is a lot of what John mentioned before we all came on stage, right? So it’s speed, cost, ease of access, ease of use, especially for the people who were building on top of traditional rails. 

There were three specific things that caught our eye apart from that. One was we were trying to go global, so trying to work with local banks, local regulations was a lot of pain. And it’s not that you can’t do it. It’s just going to be long and painful. And Ramp is known for its velocity. We’re trying to move very, very quickly. So for us, that was incredibly important, and we found that with the Bridge and Stripe partnership. Number two is I’ve got my Treasury PM sitting in the audience: we have gone from corporate cards to bill payments to now managing treasury for our customers. And a key pain point that we saw for our customers is allowing customers to move money between entities no matter where those entities are, because our customers are global. And as we were expanding globally, as we were thinking through new use cases and new products, we just found that this was a better technology to work with.

And again, we have our own run-ins with licenses, and we’re probably going to go solve that problem at some point, too. It’s just that we want to balance and do both. We want to move very, very quickly, but also find a way for our technology and infrastructure to be interoperable. But that was the genesis of all of this, pretty much. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah. I mean, it seems like a lot in the last—and Monica, I’m guessing you can in particular feel this—has come together in the last two years or so, where you had a lot of that connectivity being built in local markets. And then you had a lot of the regulatory momentum globally that has facilitated both the receptivity to stablecoins and the connectivity from stablecoins to the fiat infrastructure, which has made it much, much more possible for folks to build in the space. 

And so for you and your, Ruben, you and your end customers, you said first you were sending them this, like, wrapped, you know, version of Bitcoin. How has their own‚—I’m guessing when you first started paying them out in this digital currency format, they were probably pretty skeptical, whether it was selling this into enterprises or delivering it to end customers. How has receptivity, interest, engagement changed over time? 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Well, I think as the ecosystem has grown, and that’s a very cool thing about stablecoins, is that we’re all sort of building sort of tentacles into local banking systems, and their tentacles into the banking system of Nigeria sort of make Airtm even more compatible to Nigeria, just because it’s a very big network. And I think as that network has evolved, then the true compatibility of this internet version of money becomes real. And I think as people on the ground adopt stablecoins and other similar solutions to solve their own problems, they sort of end up realizing that that stablecoin that they use to hedge inflation or pay the rent, whatever, locally, is also connected to the internet. And I think that that makes them have an aha moment where it’s like, “Oh my god, this cash that I’m using to preserve my wealth here is also compatible with the internet.” And I think that’s amazing. It’s compounding as time goes by. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah, totally makes sense. I mean, we’ve been—you know, when I started, when we started building Bridge, all of my past experience was US fintech. I had worked at Square and Coinbase, and we were mostly serving US consumers, building US products, and so I had no or very limited understanding of what people, you know, receptivity to these products internationally. And I was shocked when the first developers coming to us were in LATAM and like, you know, and telling us about—

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: We were waiting for you. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah. And so Monica, what about you? You know, Ripple has huge plans I’m sure over like the next couple years. You launched a stablecoin. There’s a ton that you all want to do. What are some of the big gaps between where you are today and where you want to be, and what are you all doing to fill those in? 

MONICA LONG: Yeah. So yeah, we talked about the challenge. All of us feel this. We’re all in payments. Building a global network is very hard, and there’s no real shortcut to the hard work. And so that continues, broadens and deepens the network. And I would also say in our world of stablecoins and blockchain digital asset payments, it’s also liquidity. That takes time to build so that you can get the efficiency and beat the efficiency that you see in traditional markets. 

And so, yeah, I mean, you can contrast, you know, today, or I think in 2024, global FX was like $200 trillion in terms of total volumes. And I’ve seen stats like stablecoin volumes last year were like $25, $27 trillion. That’s awesome. I think we have to acknowledge a lot of that’s driven by speculative trading, which is valid and useful toward building liquidity, but also we need to get that stablecoin liquidity against global currency pairs, and so that’s a lot of work. 

And our approach to it has been to bring traditional finance, bring institutional use cases into digital assets and stablecoins. We acquired a prime brokerage, Hidden Road, announced a couple weeks ago. And, you know, thesis there: like one, we’re able, we now have access to, like, interbank rates for digital asset and fiat trades. And then also, you know, for Ripple USD, our stablecoin, they’re gonna use that as a collateral option for their hundreds of institutional clients, and they’re doing like $3 trillion a year, so that will help quickly to deepen liquidity. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And access to interbank rates, that means you can go from your stablecoin to MXN or BRL or something at basically midmarket? 

MONICA LONG: Yes. Yes. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Interesting. That’s great. 

MONICA LONG: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, challenges continue. So there’s always more work to do. 

ZACH ABRAMS: I mean, one of the first things that we saw with folks who were building, you know, and some of our APIs was, you know, you had the consumer cross-border payments market, which is like pretty competitive-wise and others. And you had the enterprise market, which is pretty competitive with, like, JPMorgan or something. And then you had this whole middle area serving small, medium businesses that was, like, super broken, and people were paying hundreds of basis points to send money back and forth, and so if they could send that across your rails, you know, more or less in real time, it’s very meaningful. 

MONICA LONG: Yes, yes. Game-changing. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And then so on the Ramp side, you know, you’re building a global card backed by stablecoins. How are you thinking about rolling that out to folks? How are you thinking about receptivity to stablecoins? How are you thinking about positioning it? 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: So there’s a famous quote in technology, like what we build is car, not the faster horse. But what people don’t realize—like, that quote by Henry Ford gets used a lot—that when cars were first introduced, to make it easy for people to get accustomed to cars, a lot of horse terminology was used. So we still use horsepower to talk about this. We still use the word trunk to talk about, you know, storage that’s behind the car. We still use the word dashboard. Dashboard came from boards that was literally used to dash the dirt around the hooves of horses, if you didn’t know. 

ZACH ABRAMS: I had no idea. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: And the word car comes from carriage. So all of this, I go back to some of the principles around product building at Ramp, which is very, very design forward, very much UX forward, and making it easy for our customers to just do the thing that they are trying to do with as minimal work for them, which means that when we’re adopting a new technology like stablecoins, that for us, at the very beginning, stablecoins must be invisible to them. And this is especially true when you’re talking about businesses that are dealing with someone else’s money, right? 

So what does this mean? It’s like for this card that we’re going to ship out, v1 probably looks like that we handle all complexity. You don’t have to worry about crypto jargon, you don’t have to think about wallets, you don’t have to think about FX, you don’t have to think about what it means if it’s on this chain versus the other. We will optimize where that money goes for you, and it’s cheapest, fastest, most stable rail possible for our users. But do I believe that that’s going to be the case five years from now? Probably not, because people will get comfortable, in my mind, because I am bullish on this particular trend. But v1 is probably something that is fairly abstracted away for at least our customers. You don’t get an NPS of 69 that rivals Apple’s by making new jargon for customers available. So yeah, trying our best to do that for at least the v1. The app layer, very simple, very easy to understand. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah, love it. I mean, in a lot of cases, the stablecoin has kind of been pushed forward because it’s like the new, you know, kind of shiny thing. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: Yeah. 

ZACH ABRAMS: But, you know, ultimately people are coming for some core financial service, whether it’s getting paid or whether it’s moving money across borders or whether it’s being able to spend. And I’m most optimistic about the stablecoin infrastructure receding into the background and just enabling whatever the core customer need might be. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: Totally. Customers come to you to do their jobs, not to learn new things. Sometimes they learn, but that’s a byproduct. 

ZACH ABRAMS: Yeah. They want the horsepower. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: They want the horsepower. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And the dashboard and the trunk. Yeah. Okay, last question very quickly. You know, if stablecoins right now represent about, let’s say less than 1% of total global payment volume: in, like, five years, where do you think we’ll be? We’ll go down the line. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: I’ll say that, I’ll take ownership over our corner. 

ZACH ABRAMS: What corner is that? 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Cross-border payments for people who work online, $2 trillion. Yeah. 

MONICA LONG: $2 trillion, okay. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: In payments, real payments. 

MONICA LONG: One percent, yeah. It’s hard to make these predictions. I’ll say 10% of volumes, and I’m basing that off of, I think that corporate treasury will be a major use case, and I know that’s a very large market, so within five years, I think we can get there. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: Yeah. Hard to predict five years, but if I was going to use my math brain on probably 10 to 15, as Monica mentioned, upside, if people really dive into more traditional use cases, it could see an upside up to 30%, because right now, we are seeing stablecoin adoption for fringe use cases still. But mainstream use cases move a lot more volume, so if there’s even a slight paradigm shift of those mainstream use cases seeing more adoption, you might see the growth rate go up from what, 50% was what John was mentioning, to maybe 70, 80 in any given year. So I don’t know. Five years is a long time though. 

ZACH ABRAMS: It is a long time. I’m probably the most optimistic. I think everything will end up being moved through a stablecoin rail. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: You’re 100%. 

ZACH ABRAMS: No, no, no, not in five years. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: In five years? 

ZACH ABRAMS: Probably over 50%. I’ve been shocked by how quickly it’s gone for our business, very, very shocked. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Will agents on Stripe use stablecoins to settle? 

ZACH ABRAMS: Exactly. When there’s billions and billions and billions of agents and they’re just paying each other, it’s quickly going to dwarf the minuscule amount that we humans move. 

Okay, with that, thank you all for participating in the panel. 

SUBHAM AGARWAL: Thank you. 

ZACH ABRAMS: And thank you all for staying and watching this last session of Sessions. And hope you all enjoyed the conference, and safe travels home. Bye, everyone. 

RUBEN GALINDO STECKEL: Bye.