Alex Fine on Why Fintechs Going On Chain Is The Biggest Opportunity Right Now

Transcript

Alex, welcome to the tower, man. Good to have you. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> Welcome. Welcome. >> To be here. >> Beautiful day in New York. >> Gorgeous day. Gorgeous day. >> Not a bad view. Good vibes. >> Fantastic vibes. >> Congrats on the recent raise. I know you guys put a lot of energy and effort into that one. And I feel like it was proper timing given the maturation of the industry. The realization that payments, stable coins, tokenized assets amidst this kind of broad web 2.5, fintech era is very much uh in the limelight and very, you know, a very clear use case of what we're doing. So, bravo on that. I I appreciate it. I mean, it's pretty exciting because we started the company saying, "Hey, we're we're really big believers in fintex going on chain and if you go back four years, 5 years in

crypto, like that wasn't a thing." And now it's really starting to manifest like those kind of like web 2, web 3 companies like ours are starting to hit a stride. So, >> it's exciting and we're at the very beginning. >> Yeah. No, I mean, most definitely. I I actually was speaking to a guy on JP Morgan's innovation team like last week here and he came in and he basically said that he agrees and that they agree that stable coins will be the primary form of payments. Um we're on our stabled up show episode number 35. Shout out to our friends at Fracks. We've got Alex Fle. [cheering and screaming] Alex um let's just start with an understanding of the mission of fun and just kind [cheering] of understanding what it is that you are setting out to achieve w with fun. what is the main

problem space that you're looking to attack? >> Yeah, so I'll I'll differentiate kind of fun and how we work from traditional payments companies. There there are a lot of payments companies out there, a lot of crypto payments companies out there. And the way most of those companies work is they say, "Hey, we are going to build a rail. We're going to convert euros into USDC. We're going to convert USDT over here to USDC over there." And we said, hey, that's kind of valuable to a certain extent, but ultimately the applications that are really building the future of finance.

They're they don't care about moving asset A to asset B, ultimately what they care is getting as many dollars into the platform as possible. >> So what we do at our core, we're the highest converting way to get money onto a blockchain. Like that is our primitive. Nobody if you AB test our flow against any other flow nobody is better at getting money onto a blockchain and then that manifest that primitive can apply to all sorts of different verticals. So it will apply to your classic fintech apps building on chain like poly markets and lighters. It can apply to global commerce applications. It can apply to traditional fintexs looking to take in crypto. There there are kind of like all these applications where blockchains create utility and ultimately we're the

best way to get money onto a blockchain. Like that is what we do at our core. >> Yeah. And when you when you think about like getting money onto blockchains, right, people think about like on-ramps, offramps, often just exchanges as well. And like there is certainly a focus on like getting a US dollar or a euro onto the blockchain into like a stable coin format. Um right. And so that's kind of like the entry point. It it used to not be that way. It used to be kind of like you would buy on like you know way back you would buy on exchange, you'd buy your Bitcoin or whatever and then you use that to trade pairs. Now all the trading on centralized exchanges is mostly USDT or USDC denominated and then onchain is kind of a mix of like ETH,

Soul, etc. When it comes to actually getting people's money from fiat into stable coins, why why would I why would I use fun? What is so great about fund compared to an exchange or a different platform? What what you know makes you guys unique in that respect? >> Yeah. Well, I'll answer the question kind of in in two parts. One, we can do a little bit of an overview on hey, how do how do we get to where we are in terms of stable coin payments and deposits and then more directly answer your question. So I I think there were really three eras for how we moved money on chain. We had era one which is your centralized exchange era. Like Coinbase started as a Bitcoin on-ramp and people would go to your go to Coinbase, go to

Binance, they'd buy their crypto and then they would move it into their wallet right? >> That was phase one. Then we went to phase two, which is kind of this like intermediary on style world. Think of those like iframes that you typically see. Imagine you go into your favorite wallet, you see a list of different providers who each have their own iframe to onboard funds. And a solution like that like feels a little bit more native, but they have a lot of different friction points built in. Now we're moving to this third era. And this third era is really purpose-built for we call them the fintex onchain and what that means is their their finance apps just like any other finance apps. They just decided to pick a better backend which is blockchains to build their finance app on top of. And for those types of

applications, they're able to access a payment workflow that is at par with almost like where we started 10 years ago in terms of the the payment experience, the conversion rates, the, you know, KYC streamlining, the risk threshold, like all the components that go into high conversion deposits. We're able to get back to kind of where we were originally with centralized exchange level experience for decentralized and onchain kind of applications. So, I could talk more about what that looks like in practice, but those are kind of like the phases that we've seen the market going through.

>> Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. I I I remember going on Coinbase in 2017 and just putting in my debit card. That was the that was the only KYC that was needed. >> That's I mean, that's you you should have KYC to ensure that you are compliant to ensure you are compliant with all rules and regulation. But most of the KYC that you experience when you're going through on ramps, that is not to do with compliance. That is to do with in our opinion poorly built but risk models at the end of the day and it's bad risk and and we think there are better ways to manage those kind of things. >> Interesting. And how much of the volume that you're seeing is directly you know fiat currency or you know dollars, euros, etc. directly just to stable coins like is that the is that the

primary flow? >> It's man to stable coins over 99%. >> Really? That's just like the easiest way to do it is just take your dollars get stable coins and then use them to do whatever you want with them. I I mean at our core we um we you know we users shouldn't know we exist right so you would ask like how would I use fund yeah you would go on you know something like lighter or something like poly market you would deposit and you shouldn't actually even really know that that we exist you shouldn't have to know that we exist you should just be on that platform depositing on that platform um and many of those platforms take stable coins and that's how most users prefer to transact >> and then do you make money on that >> we'll make a small amount of money so

our our model is very much kind of like a Costco model, we realize that if you if all these companies are fragmented and they each have to build their own payment stack, they're each paying a certain amount for that. But because we can bring it all together and we can have one unified flow, we can then compress all of our downstream vendors. And so what that means is that we can offer the best market rate. We can offer rates that you can't get anywhere else. And then we are able to take margin from the kind of Costco model of massive scale. And that that really is our business model.

>> And who's providing that that liquidity on the weekends and you know on Memorial Day, you know, I'm trying to buy hyperlquid trying to go on lighter and go long. Who's providing that liquidity? >> Yeah. So I'll kind of answer the the meta question like what like what is the delta between the liquidity requirements, the routing requirements for a deposit flow versus kind of what you traditionally see in web 3? And there there's a meaningful kind of delta and this is where a lot of our value lives between call it like a 29 SLA and like a 6ix9ine SLA. If you are going through a deposit flow, it always needs to work. If you're going to deposit a million, $10 million, I think our largest deposit is like $40 million. You you just always need to clear. You can't

do a $40 million deposit and then you're like, oops, it didn't work. Like you can't ever have that. Whereas if you think about going to unis swap, sometimes it might work if you want to do $40 million, but sometimes it might not work if you want to do $40 million. And that kind of isn't isn't an option. And so that goes back to your question, you know, what does that look like on the back end? Where do those liquidity sources come from? And we'll we'll bring together a number of different providers to ensure that we can hit those highle SLAs's. So this is everything from your public providers that we might get special rates on. We'll work with private providers that might not be publicly available. And then we'll we'll build our own rate or our own route sorry as as fallback mechanisms um to

ensure that all deposits all transactions are always fulfilled. So there's it's a whole stack is kind of the answer to your question. >> Yeah. Yeah. And okay so let's kind of look at this holistically. There's a there's a some sort of demand to come on chain. People with dollars typically probably aligned with a bullish market or just a you know wanting to try a new product or whatever it is. I come in with my dollars. I want to get them into stable coins onto an application on chain. I go on these applications. They have a deposit function. I'm able to click that deposit function. It runs through fund on the back end and then I get stable coins at the end. Great rate.

I pay a little fee. Fund makes money at, you know, kind of at an economy of scale type of uh, you know, mindset. I don't really even know that I use fund. And you guys just consistently exist at you know 99.99999% of deliverable effectiveness and that's your business >> essentially. Yeah. So like when you click on the deposit flow we will power that deposit flow everything from the front end. So we run a bunch of intelligence where you are going to deposit very differently than myself most likely. Actually we're both in New York. We're both in crypto. So maybe we're actually pretty similar. Um, but we're going to deposit pretty differently than say a market maker in Dubai, then a retail user in India, then someone in South Korea, then a mid-market person in Europe. And the way

a lot of these teams have solved this in the past is if like imagine you look like the big i gaming sites, you look like a stake.com. Stake.com's great you, but these sites, they'll have like 40 different payment methods on the screen. That is not a very high converting flow. At the end of the day, we're each probably going to use one or two assets. like we probably have a bunch of USDC on base and you know or a bunch of USDC on arbitr something like that and the likelihood that we use you know SEPA to do our deposit is is probably pretty low and so you want flows at the very front that's really smart that kind of knows the one or two payment methods a user is most likely to use like for example if you've kyted and saved a card with us

you're going to be 19 times more likely to use that card than just a random user coming to the site like that should probably affect how you change the deposit flow when most of these sites that won't change it at all, right? So, we we have the full front end and then we do everything back to the back end routing. >> Yeah. Okay. So, then let's kind of get to like the broader bigger idea here, which is Stripe is going all in on stable coin payments with Tempo. Shopify is adding or has already added USDC payment flows. Um, you know, you we've heard the likes of Amazon and some of these others either doing it in their own native, you know, coin or token or doing it with stable coins. Um, and now we're seeing they're all also the rise of cryptolink cards.

>> And so in the broader landscape of stable coin adoption from some of like the largest e-commerce providers, you know, is there a strategy for fun? Do you guys have an in here? How do you how do you guys capitalize on the broader kind of h like the like the broader trend that's happening which is very much a lot of these e-commerce businesses are trying to adopt stable coins. How does fund get in there and kind of make it uh a a part of your business? >> Yeah, it's it's a good question. So, without naming specifics, we are working with um we're in the process of uh co-designing a a solution with a very large commerce site. Now, our philosophy is not to be speculative in how we

build. So, we won't go and like build a bunch of stuff for commerce and then see how it lands. We co-design work with with really big customers. Now, a lot of our work so far, what we've been really focused on is the the fintex onchain. And I think this market is actually going to be multitudes, orders of magnitudes larger than what we're going to see on commerce. Like stable coins are big, right? Stable coins, hundreds of billions of stable coin things. Stable coins are going to grow 10x, 100x. But we think real assets on chain. I mean, if you just think about your own money, what percent of your money is in cash, right? What percent of is in stable coins? Probably singledigit percentages, if that. We think [clears throat] that relative proportionality is going to be the same proportionality between stable coins and all other assets and all other value

where that market is going to be 10 times 20 times larger and thus is going to grow 10x 200x from where where we are today. And so that's a lot of what we're focused on. It's like those fintech applications leveraging blockchains in the back end. >> Okay. So big fintech big e-commerce company comes to fund. I want to design a stable coin payments flow. Is that kind of like the demand question? And then the the value or the supply is just kind of like, all right, let's build something that allows your customers if they want to pay in stable coins to pay in stable coins or receive payouts in stable coins. Like what is the like e-commerce is kind of a two-sided transaction, right? There's a merchant

and a customer and then there's refunds, there's chargebacks, there's payouts, there's there's all sorts of kind of like functions of the business. What is can you just kind of without talking about who it is or what the company is or the specs of the deal, what does that actually mean for funds involvement in something like that? >> Yeah. So, so what we'll commonly see is we'll see a merchant that will say, "Hey, we're we're trying to go into these certain markets." Yeah. >> And we're trying to figure out how to get as much money from those markets as possible and blockchains are a good conduit to doing so. And so, what does kind of like the web two alternative look like here? you would go look look like an Uber or even like a a DraftKings. DraftKings is just in the US. They have a hundred people on their

payments and onboarding team. Uber has hundreds of people on their global payments team. And so for them, that's kind of the choice. They're saying, "Hey, you know, maybe we're a fintech or or a service provider in Argentina or Chile and we're trying to go to the rest of South America." Or maybe they think, "Hey, we have PMF in in in broader global regions." And now there's there's a little bit of a fork in the road. So they can either build out a full payments team themselves. They can go to all those regions, understand the highest converting payment methods, go through any licensing requirements or relationship requirements to set those up or they can they can work with a vendor like ours where all we do is kind of optimizing those payment flows.

>> Got it. And this is not just in the US. I assume >> most of our business is international. >> Really? >> Yeah. Over 95%. >> Wow. So we're talking like non USD stable coins then. Oh, well it's still USD stable coins. Yeah, it's still USD stable coins, but it's users outside the US right? >> Yeah. I mean, I think in the US like our rails work pretty good. Robin Hood app is fantastic. I like Robin Hood. You know, it's not that hard for me to get dollars. Not that hard for me to buy Apple stock. >> But those challenges are are very very real outside of the United States. Like fintech applications outside of the United States are very often uh scams.

And this is something we've seen where when we work in high trust environments, you know, teams just care about the deposit flow. When we go to regions where fintech applications are are are sketchy, we see teams really start to care about the withdrawal flow as well. So, can you deposit and can you withdraw immediately and then deposit again? So, it's like those sets of requirements are very very different. >> Yeah. >> But it's all outside the United States >> and it's mostly USD, you know, stable coins like the big ones. >> People around the world want Western assets, want dollars, want US equities. >> Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

What do you think is is the part of your business that's going to grow the most following this raise? You know, you have a ton of capital to basically grow and scale. You know, what are you going to use this capital for? What part of the business are you really trying to, you know, kind of bootstrap and accelerate? >> Yeah, it's a good question. This kind of gets to my philosophies on building companies. I >> That's where we're going. >> That's That's where we're going. I I I think you know most people you ask most founders like a lot of VCs would ask me, they be like, "Oh, what are your what are your moes? what are your like competitive advantages? You know, and we have very real competitive advantages at scale. When you look at startups in general, I don't believe startups have true competitive advantages when they're

early on. Like anything five people in a room, 10 people, 20 people in a room can do in a year. Someone else can put 20 people in a room and do it in a year, you know? And so the the reason I say is I think our our only real competitive advantage when we are an early stage company is people. It is having the best people, people who are smarter, who grind harder, who have more just craft and love and care for the work that they do. And like that is how we win. And so you're asked like, "Oh, we raise money. What are we going to use? How are we going to use it? How are we going to it's all people. It is it is finding the very very very best people." And I think that's even more true in an AIdriven world. And so our team currently is

super stacked. like our team is really really strong but it's just how do we take that quality and how do we extend it even further? How do we have like an open AI anthropic level talent density in the you know this modern fintech space which I think we totally can have like this is the coolest work you can be doing if you don't if you don't like AI or like AI isn't for you there's nowhere else where you're solving sicker problems than in in our industry. >> Yeah. and being 26 and you know not having a college degree and kind of uh you know having like a young feel and h how does it how is it like hiring folks 5 10 20 years older than yourself managing a team? How do you how do you

garner the respect of your team and you know kind of build a culture of shipping? >> You know it's a it's a good question. I obviously look young. I have youthful mannerisms. Uh but but I think often when I meet with execs and spend time with execs who are who who have real pattern recognition for what best practices look like. That's when we kind of build comfort. And I actually haven't had a respect issue. I mean most of our team is is all older. I think I'm one of the youngest people uh at our team. We're mid-30s by headcount. A lot of folks we're moving a lot of money. A lot of folks have real pattern recognition for how to you know we create technology to help move money

and they have pattern recognition for for how to do that well. Um so they're often much much older and and it's important security things like that are top of mind for us but it honestly maybe I'm fortunate maybe I'm blind to it but it hasn't been an issue. >> Yeah. I'm curious what your um decision- making framework is, right? Like I asked like how how are you going to, you know, use this capital, right? Or how who are you hiring or what market are you going to kind of attack next when it comes to like, you know, Alex's decision making framework? >> What does that look like on a, you know, decision-m basis from the CEO kind of perspective? What what are you thinking about as far as you know there's there's there's very basic like risk and reward or like positive and negative or like

pros and cons. How do you how do you make decisions that are important to the company's trajectory? >> Yeah, why don't we go back to the customer and how we add value to the customer and then that deres out the framework for which I make decisions. So how do we add value to the customer? We're the highest converting way to get money into the application. When you are at scale and you are moving hundreds of millions of dollars a month, billions of dollars a month in volume, every percentage point matters. Like the craft is critical. And so it's like, okay, everything for us is about product quality. Everything is about quality.

Everything is about craftsmanship. Like if we are the best way to move money on chain, it is in everyone's economic best interest to work with us. So now how we work comes out from that where there are a lot of companies who are very loud. I know it's ironic I'm on a podcast right now but there are a lot of companies who are loud. They do a lot of marketing. They you know all of that. That's not how we work. And in fact we've been so quiet for so long because all that matters is quality. So now you're like okay what you know what is my decision-m framework. Think about team and culture. Everything is about craft. Everything is about quality. If I'm in an interview and I ask someone what is their perfect day? I don't want someone who's going to tell me they're like researching all

kinds of new technologies and are like, you know, up toate on on this and that. That's great. That's awesome. That's a great value. That's not our value. I would rather have someone say, "Hey, I want to spend all day making a button [ __ ] perfect and beautiful and amazing and and that to me is awesome." Like those are the people we want. And so like those values of like how we deliver value to the customer that you know the rest of what we do derives from that from the people we hire to the way we work internally to the types of financial backers we want to the types of customers we partner with everything is about quality and craft >> and so are you a perfectionist then would you call yourself [laughter] a perfectionist?

>> Yeah probably yeah >> I'm like I'm quite particular >> that doesn't slow you down throughout the you know >> Oh totally slows us down. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. There there are many times where like I will see materials and they have we like if you're going to ship something externally, even you ship something internally, the quality bar needs to be ultra high. And so yeah, there have definitely been times where I've gone in materials and said this we cannot this is not going to go out just period full stop and like a meeting needs to get moved, a launch needs to get pushed. But that's just not something we are ever going to compromise on because I think that is at the very core of why we exist as a company. like we exist to serve these people. We exist to be the best. We

don't exist to just like put stuff out there. So, yeah, totally slows us down. >> Yeah. Some of the founders that I've spoken to often talk about micromanaging their team as slowing down their work. But like, you know, it's it's just something that if you work at that company, you have to deal with um how do you how do you go from like micromanaging and perfectionism to letting your best people do their best work without kind of and like having trust, right? and like being able to to to trust your team to do a good job. How do you balance like your your desire for optimal results and perfection because you know you care probably some of the most of anybody on the team versus you know letting people do their thing, letting people breathe, have space. How do you balance those two?

>> Yeah, it's it's a really good question. So the the way I view my role, I have deliverables and those deliverables I make very clear to essentially our exec team and then once we have an exec and those deliverables are clear my entire job everything I work towards is making that person successful. So whether it is resource allocation, whether it's how they want to run their teams, whether it's things I should be communicating to the team at large, like I work for them in making them successful. And so I actually give extremely high amounts of latitude and flexibility to the exec team because I find most really really

skilled execs, they have a vision, right? And if you're going to say, "Hey, you can do 70% of your vision, but it's got to be 30% of my vision for how we execute." that's going to [ __ ] up the whole thing. Like it needs to be 100% their vision and you need to do everything you can to make it like 110% their vision to make their vision awesome and massively execute on their vision, right? On how to execute and as long as the deliverables are clear like hey, you know, I think saying, "Oh, hey, we're not going to ship like subpar things." It's like, no, it's not even we're not going to ship good things. We're going to ship excellent things. We're good is going to come and we're going to say we're not okay with good and then great's going to come and we're

saying we're not okay with great and then we're going to say it needs to be excellent. As long as those expectations are set right, then my job is just helping my team perform and I work for them. >> Yeah. So I spoke to the the CEO of or the coco of Kraken Arjun Sethi about AI at Kraken following Coinbase's set of layoffs due to AI highlighted you know circumstances and you know he spoke about that internally they had this initiative that uh the employees need to be showing proficiency development in using AI over a period of time and if not that you know then there's they kind of have like this like the way out of the company process that is like they

make it very easy for people to leave and um you know he's he's built this thousands and thousands of people in their company you know [snorts] when it comes to using AI internally for yourself as well as for your team how do you how do you think about using these tools and how do you think about your team becoming more proficient at using them time over time again so that way your biggest competitors which are doing the same thing you're not kind of falling behind and how do you how do you leverage AI and your and the ability to do things with it and encourage your team to use it?

>> It's it's a really good question and it's something that I I think about a lot and in that I'm a very very big believer that AI is going to massively transform how teams organize and how teams execute. But there's an an asterisk to that where we live in the world of 6ix9ines. We live in the world of perfection >> and AI is very good at velocity, right? But you can have instances where AI will miss certain things, right? It'll miss certain contexts and it could take a 69 to a 49. And for us, that's that's really detrimental. And so we're very focused on using A, but we don't we

intentionally don't measure like how how many PRs are you submitting? How many lines of code are you submitting? Those are not the measurements of success that we're that we're orienting towards. Um, but it's it's still how do you use AI in an environment where perfection uh is needs to be just so so so core to what we do. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, we have all the team plans, all the things that you can need. It's used daily across variety of things from ideiation to execution. Um, but yeah, you know, we're still at a point where it's like, you know, there's a lot of corrections that that that still need to come. Kind of last thing on the personal side, then we'll hop back to the business. How do you differentiate your self-worth and

your your kind of um self-esteem from the success of your business, your portfolio, whatever it is, right? Like it's quite ups and downs. You know, you just raised this round, everything's great coming out of stealth. Next month your competitor signs, you know, the next biggest deal. Then you win the next one, then Bitcoin's up, then Bitcoin's down, you're in your then your girlfriend dumps you, then you get a new girlfriend. Like, it's just never ending. You know what I mean? Family troubles, etc. How do you kind of separate these external events from shaking the internal of Alex?

>> Well, let's let's start with what external events matter. The company. That is the external event that matters to me. I'm not too worried about market prices, not worried about my social life. It is the company. Now, how do you how do you separate to stay? I don't. I reject the premise. You just full scent. You just go on the roller coaster. You I completely 100% tie my own personal identity to that of the company. And so when [ __ ] when things are going hard, there's a period of like a year where like I like multiple nights a week I couldn't sleep through the night. You're waking up at 3:00 a.m. You're in the office at like 4. And I'm a big believer in like the Jeff Bezos notion of hey when you're stressed there's probably you that's probably accurate like you probably should be stressed something's

probably up. So you should the way the way you act on that is you execute. You you go you build you ship. You do things you act. And so yeah. No I just you you you're right. It's a total roller coaster and you just full ride it. You just ride the thing just full on hands in the air ride it. But then you kind of take control uh in the in the troughs you kind of recognize that you're feeling anxious for some reason. There's something wrong and you take you take control. And then in the more kind of like uh you know uh peaks you're able to kind of like not let your foot off the gas but not have to be like a you know stressed out to the max kind of be more uh practical less like uh you know day-to-day like actionoriented.

>> I mean to be honest I'm not very good at peaks. Like even when things go well, it's just not the way I see it is like I think I think a lot of happiness in life comes by removing the delta between what you know you are capable of doing and what your lived reality is at the present. And I think minimizing that delta creates a lot of happiness. And so this could be for work, right? Like what do we know the company is capable of doing versus where we are today. It could be in how a team executes. It could be how you have an interaction with someone like at your local coffee shop. Like are you treating them the way that you know you can treat people? It has the same with relationships. Like are you dating someone? Are you with someone and you know they're like the

best person you can be with? Like I think happiness comes by by minimizing that delta. And so the reason I say that is when it comes to peaks that delta is still massive for us. Like we know what it looks like to I I have a vision for what it looks like to to be the payments layer for for money going into blockchains. That's massive. Like that world is going to grow by a thousandx and our product can get 100x better to serve that. And so I haven't really felt the like peaks yet. >> I'll let you know, you know, when we're crushing it. I'm psyched for those peaks. But yeah, no, it's just like focus execute ship do act.

>> Beautiful. All right, kind of shifting back towards the fun business as we kind of come to a close here. One of the things we didn't talk about was the rise of the agentic side of the payment economy and the agentic economy. I actually just saw today there was a company called Liquid. They put out this like trading UI that allows you to like trade from an LLM directly and it trades on Hyperlid for you. We're going to see more of this like, hey, you know, take money from my bank and put it into Kraken and go on Poly Market. Like literally like deposit money from my Wells Fargo into Poly Market and bet on the Knicks to win the finals. Like >> do it now. Go. Right. like how how how does the agentic economy change the

vision or the kind of broader TAM for what you guys are doing, right? Like this is going to scale. There's going to be a lot of micro payments, a lot of like people just like trying these things to start and and and then I think it's really going to snowball. Like are you guys prepared for the agent economy? What does that even mean? Like what does that look like? >> Yeah, it's it's a good question. So I guess I'll separate this into two parts. want I'll directly answer the question like how are we thinking about it but then I think what's almost more important is kind of the meta answer the question how do we approach answering answering this question so in terms of what we do today like a lot of our flows we're very good at abstracting essentially like actions and complexities so we're very good at

saying here's an action on a blockchain and how do you originate that action from a bank account over here and so it's a very natural product to plug into aentic workflows right it's a very natural API to do so with that being Ed, we're not going on podcasts and ripping about our agentic workflows. It's kind of the same concept with commerce. We're not speculators. That's just not how we run our business. We are the type of company that has a customer in mind and we will sit down with that customer and we try to really empathize and understand what they are trying to solve for, craft a solution with them and then go from there. And so we haven't yet seen at scale applications using agentic workflows that have real kind of users

at the other end where there isn't any kind of like token incentive stuff. And so we are kind of at the front lines waiting for that to happen and we want to serve those teams. Um but the way we're going to craft the solution is in partnership with with a a partner as opposed to us kind of sitting around and and thinking about what it should be. >> And then kind of the meta answer here of like you know what's happening. Could you speak to a bit of kind of what you're seeing from your founder friends, from your investors, from customers? Like what is the what is the level of demand for this authentic payments? What are the blockers right now? What's working? Like give us a bit of a lay of the land, stable coins, agents, what's what's actually happening?

>> Yeah, I mean to be honest, we we haven't seen a ton from customers or clients on like, hey, how do we implement agentic workflows into into our current experience? like it's just not something that has come up a ton. Um so it's something we're monitoring but we we haven't seen a ton of data on it so far. >> So are you a personal believer of this kind of like onchain agentic economy X42 like this whole like matrimony holy matrimony between stable coins and blockchains and AI for kind of this ideal future of the internet was built with a fatal flaw. It didn't have a monetary system attached. Now we have it. Are you a believer in this?

>> For sure. I mean AI is is going to be massive. It is already massive. It is obvious that there is no way for an AI to move money that is not blockchains. Like it's 100% going to be on blockchains. Like that is going to be the backbone. Um so I think that's absolutely where the future is going. >> Got it. Alex, last thing for me is what's what what's what's next? What are you guys primarily focused on? We're what is it May 26th today? We're almost halfway through the year, which is bonkers. Um, what's the second half of the year look like? What are the main priorities? What are your KPIs?

>> I mean, it's it's all about people. Everything we're focused on, I'm calling it like internally the fintech 50 and we're about 30 something now. I want, you know, if you think about the intersection of three things. You think about the intersection of being very product focused, want to build something for consumers, you like to solve very hard technical problems, right? And then you have a deep passion for capital markets like you are a believer that capitalism creates a lot of good. You take stable coins, US dollars, US economy, US markets, western markets, you bring those around the world that creates a lot of good. I believe that creates a tremendous amount of good. If you're kind of at that intersection, there aren't that many really super sexy

places to go where you are really at that cutting edge and pushing all three of those really far. And so if we think about the next half of the year, it's it's really, you know, for for the people who are at that intersection, it is it is forming, you know, it's finding like the top 50 people in that world and and uh building the best team. >> Beautiful. Ladies and gentlemen, that has been Alex Fine on Stabled Up, episode number 34, live from the tokenization tower here, the Empire State Building. Alex, that was great, man.