How Stablecoins Are Driving Global Payments with Ryne Saxe

Transcript

Stable coins are the shortest top on chain for the average person. They should also be the shortest top crosschain for the average person. You know, whether you're sort of crypto deep and more crypto aware or not, doesn't matter. What makes these institutions want to build either in a multi-chain environment which facilitates what you guys do or on a you know semi-permissioned permissionless chain environment where they have also kind of a bit more control over. And we build a lot of great tech, but it turns out at the end of the day, you got to translate it into something very simple that people want. And clearly people want stables. So good on [Music] us. Welcome back to the world. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guest, the brightest minds at

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All right, Ryan, we're in NYC for Stablecon. Um, a lot of stable coin people here. There's about a thousand people in the city this week uh just championing stable coins. No doubt. Yeah. This this would not have happened 2 years ago. No. No way. I often tell people in the early days of ECO, there were like two pitches for Eco. One was to get people to believe that stable coins were going to be a thing. Yeah. And then I could get them to to hopefully believe eco was going to be a thing. Now I just don't have to do the first one anymore, right? Like that one's just true. Yeah. And so we can talk only about eco without having to convince people what stables are and why they're important. Yeah. I mean that was a big part of the entire markets education gap for stable coins, but also

just for digital assets as a whole. I kind of feel like we've crossed that chasm as as an entire industry as as of the last like year or two. 100%. No doubt. Yeah. So, let's just start with some hot takes on on stable coins. You had one that we were just talking about with regards to fragmentation. Eco is quite focused on essentially solving the stable coin fragmentation problem. We we both agree that stables are the best asset to transfer across chains. Um, you know, there are native versions on certain chains, there are wrap versions on on some chains, and there are more issuers coming into the market now than ever. Obviously, we've got USDC and Circle, Tether and USDT. Um, and now we we're seeing a lot more entrance come in. And your take is fragmentation is

going to get worse before it gets better. Okay. 100%. But like worse than it was in cuz in 2020 21 we had like wormhole wrapped stable coins and then like Axel wrapped stable coins and then you know you native USDC and then EU USDC on Avalanche. There was just like there was a lot going on. Feels better now. It does feel better now. It's a little bit different market space in 2021, right? like a bunch of us defi dgens were kind of like willing to tolerate it. Yeah. Right. Probably actually transacting more often in ETH than stables back then, at least many of us. Right. So, I think it's just a little bit different market um with a lot of new entrance in the meantime, but way more chains and protocols that matter and are super legit today. Bunch of flashes in the pan of 2021. Bunch of

it, well, all of it really was built on Ethereum mainet, right? Totally different landscape now. The roll-ups and sort of like the Altel ones. I think that um you know there's there's probably like an 8020 rule there. There's there's going to be you know 10 to 20 chains that do the vast majority of the volume on different VMs some of them now. And so it's just a different landscape. And if you think about it, every single week there is a new chain or protocol and or a new stable deployment or launch announcement. Every single one of those adds a row or a column to the fragmentation matrix. Right. And um so yeah, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. And I think in some sense that's actually Eco's market

opportunity, right? We're sort of in the interop space among chains, but we view stable coins as a really important solution for that. So with the addition of new stable coin issuers as well as chains, um there's this demand that's clearly here. Yeah. Um but but I think people in the community are still trying to kind of wrap their head around like why and how. And so I would love to just understand from your perspective like the market landscape of stable coins from the issuers perspective into the chain perspective and also into like the application perspective as to these certain DeFi applications using them like why are there so many issuers coming to try to compete with circle and tether like is there a real market

opportunity there now and then we're we we're also kind of shifting towards like what I would call like purpose-built chains for stable coins you mentioned plasma converge like like where's the where's the market opportunity in those two sectors and then how does that kind of tie into like this broader kind of like stable coin supply chain. Okay. So there's a few there's like a few segments that you mentioned there. Let's start with just like the issuer landscape itself. There's I think three market opportunities for an issuer today. One is that um Tether and USDC gained tons of traction on particular chains but chains are launching faster than they are expanding. So naturally that's white space for a new entrant.

Number two, they obviously don't share interest with end users and so that's a huge incentive opportunity for a new entrant. Number three, programmability. Right now they're both getting better about this. Okay, but right now from an sort of like an issuers's perspective, um there may be any number of things that you want to program into the stable coin sort of rules for transacting, yield share, uh distribution model, etc. And that's a new opportunity as well. Well, I think that's an area where the likes of M0 are seeing sort of some traction, right? And so from the issuers's perspective, there are there's still a lot a lot of white space in the market, right? Demand for stables and new chain expansion are both growing more quickly than Tether and USDC have been able to meet. Great, great

opportunity. Um, from the chain perspective, this something you also asked about, right? Well, first of all, stablecoin is the most interoperable asset on chain. It's it's the only asset class can get you that can get you across any sort of routing kind of vector, right? And so I think any new chain that's launching knows they need to kingmake a stable or you know a sort of handful of stables in order to get people into their chain, right? Especially if they're outside Ethereum.

If the sort of ETH is not going to cross that chasm, it's going to be a stable coin that gets liquidity from point A to point B and gets it into their new chain. And then you increasingly have sort of like some specialized chains like the plasmas, the codeexes, the converge you mentioned. And I think they're just looking at sort of the demand for stables at large. They understand that having super fast, super cheap, highly highly optimized stable coin transactions is sort of like a valuable case on chain and they're trying to own a lot of that flow and you can just customize a lot of your smart contract kind of implementation as well as your VM to just make it better for transacting in stables and they all have a slightly different angle on that, right? And so that's sort of the way I

see the chain landscape, why stables are important to it. And I think also you mentioned app developers. Yeah. Kind of like closing off this supply chain. It's like issuers to chains and then to the applications. So this is um yeah, this is this is an area where I'm pretty opinionated. Um stable coins are the shortest top on chain for the average person. Yeah, they should also be the shortest top crosschain for the average person. you know, whether you're sort of crypto deep and more crypto aware or not, doesn't matter. Um, those things being true, I believe that if you hold a stable anywhere on chain, that should be good enough to do the thing you want to do wherever else on chain. Yeah. And whatever else it is. And we're at a point now where we can stitch together

that user journey in a way that's one click and makes sense. What that means for an app developer is that just like a user shouldn't have to intuitit these crosschain actions, neither should the average app developer. Kind of depends on the use case, right? if you have like a deeper web 3 or D5 use case on the front end, the app developer is going to need to sort of um understand that landscape maybe a little bit better. But if you're trying to just get somebody to hold a stable onchain to do a thing, then I think we're close to the point where the app developer need not be able to kind of uh or need not uh fully sort of encode that crosschain logic and that crosschain kind of market mapping into their front end, right? We should just let a user hold a stable and be able to

route them to do a thing they want to do. And so you're obviously seeing sort of like a bunch of bank alternative apps try to get people to hold stables today. But I actually think that that's going to expand and just like the average kind of web 2 like UX normie UX crypto enabled app is just going to need to build for a stable coin native user experience and then leave the rest of the crosschain logic whatever it may be to the underlying kind of networking layers. And um I think we're close to that being reality. Yeah. I mean, we've seen, you know, the Venmos of the world, the PayPal of the world incorporate crypto purchases and such, but in incorporating stable coin rails into those would would be it. It's like the

easiest way for our entire space to penetrate the fintech category without shoving anything down their throats that they don't want%, which is kind of it's kind of what crypto's felt like for a while. Uh especially if you've been in the space for a while. Yeah. Um but but this just this this kind of demonstrates the power of okay we we built something that is better than what what is currently happening yeah in the space and like you know we're just going to bring it to you guys and you know you guys can adopt it and it's going to make your product better. It's very mutualistic uh kind of experience I think and I think that's why it's it's actually working. Totally. And I also like sometimes I encounter maybe on Twitter or somewhere like a little bit of disappointment from some crypto deeper people like we've been building

all this time and the best we've come up with is an effing stable coin, you know? I mean I say it all the time like dollarize everybody. I didn't get into crypto to build stable coins. Like that's that wasn't my endgame. You know what I mean? Totally. But my counter to that is like we're on the path. Yeah, of course. We are on the path. Yeah. There are a bunch of assumptions we made that were not true in 2015 to 2020 era that people were just going to be willing to adopt a different currency. Yeah. No, it's like a it's a step too far. You got to get them on chain first. Yeah. And then show them on chain that their money can like they can have greater optionality and their money can work better and then let them opt into the to the deeper stuff. And stable coins are

just like that that first step. And we've really unlocked that first step in mass right now for sort of the average person and and like institutional capital alike. And so my counter to that is kind of like bearishness perspective is like no it's happening. Yeah, of course. Maybe not as fast as any of us wanted it to happen several years back, but it's happening and it's accelerating and stable coins are going to be that unlock, right? And we build a lot of great tech, but it turns out at the end of the day, you got to translate it into something very simple that people want and clearly people want stables. So good on us, right? Let's go from there. Yeah.

So you guys are building um kind of like this interrupt kind of orchestration type of layer if you will for the stable coin ecosystem. So obviously you see value in that, but outside of Eco in in in this kind of stable coin supply chain that that you laid out from issuance to chains to applications, you you mentioned a few areas where there are uh room for competition. For example, in the issuance, um Tether and Circle don't pay the yield back to their users, right? So Tether is earning billions of dollars and 13 to 14 billion last year on the back of four or 5% treasury bills, short-term treasury bills where it's kind of like the hidden cost of holding a tether. Y now that the counterpoint to that is like well this

doesn't really matter because in you know you know in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, they just want access to dollars. They want to be able to save in dollars. They don't really care about the yield perhaps not educated enough or it's not a you know that's not the main concern. It's more about this kind of way to save. Y so that's just like one example of where you could see you know something like M0 come in and kind of like chip away at that market share. Where else do you see opportunity in that supply chain? It it could be chain app um you know issuance like is are there other clear uh opportunities or companies that you're seeing pursue um you know and like what are they doing or like why do you think this is an opportunity that that needs to be addressed? I'm just trying to get a

better understanding of like where there are maybe some kinks in this supply chain or like a bit of like in inefficiencies. Well, there's inefficiencies all over the place in so far as you need to do anything else crosschain, right? But that's what we've already talked about. That's just the fragmentation matrix. More into that, right? And so that just is um it's not really a knock on USC and and USDT. It's just that they're exposing one competition flank on the interest equation to other new entrance. Of course, clearly they've been very successful caring about what they've cared about so far, right? And I'm sure they'll meet that competition head on as it heats up, right? So, it's not really a knock. It's just sort of an admission that there's still some space to play there, right? Um, and so the question you're asking is like where else outside

the issuance equation where there like where there might be the most opportunity for this use case or like where where like people always say like where's the value going to occur which I think is a silly way to think about so some of the markets but like yeah like where where is the where's the opportunity outside of issuance that people aren't seeing. I always tend to think that value occurs to wherever uh to whoever owns liquidity. Okay. Um like order flow like Yeah, I I think that's sort of like a how would I put it? It's kind of like a barbell strategy in the sense that I think that like transmission fees in between are going to get commoditized down to something very very low. I hope. Yeah. Right. This is a faster better way of moving, right?

That's the whole point. And I think that whoever sort of owns liquidity or owns order flow on the front end is going to have much more margin. And so we tend to think about both of those sides of the equation. And to the extent we capture fees in between in our own network, we assume in our long-term models that those fees eventually go to like effectively zero, right? And so I think that the better you can sort of in-house and manage stable coin liquidity certainly crosschain and cross asset that becomes a very valuable opportunity. The more front-end actions you can translate into a stable send also becomes a very interesting opportunity because it allows the developer to kind of build that stable coin native UX without having to worry about more. like we talked about. Um we're not really there on either one of

the on the sort of like uh seeing tons of I think unit economics with either one of those opportunities yet. It's still early days. So most of the stable coin use cases we're seeing are just like very boring and very simple and very fee based and that might be fine especially in an onchain kind of off-chain hybrid environment, right? Set up a B2B wholesale payment platform. have your people like incentivize your customers to opt into holding and moving stables instead of dollars. Everybody wins. Yeah. Right. Like that's very clearly what we're seeing right now and that's great. It's a strong demand signal. I'm focused more on the onchain value capture and the onchain capital efficiency. I think there's still like a lot to optimize and play out there, but most of what we're seeing right now uh I

think is in that kind of hybrid onchain offchain use case because the onchain kind of interop or liquidity management just like isn't quite there yet. Um and the fact of the matter sort of is at the end of the day a lot of people want to settle in and out of their stables uh with some frequency and so you need to sort of hedge uh and allow them to do that. And so, um, I think the use case landscape right now is like actually a little bit boring, but not in a bad way. It's early days. I think it's going to get sort of way more interesting and way more programmable as we get through the rest of this year and into next year. M so when you talk about the like the settlement and you know on the liquidity front here from what I understand is

like there's a last mile problem here with a lot of these coins where it's like where stable coins where it's trying to get them off of a chain or off of the onchain rails into um a a spendable account whether it be a bank, a fintech, etc. where there are fees and delays. Y are you guys addressing that problem? Who's addressing that problem? Like is that problem in every country? Is it is it a is it better with certain stable coins? Like like like what is the landscape of that problem and is it something that is like you know that we need to be seriously concerned about?

I still think it's a little bit early on that problem. Like that's a network effect problem. Okay. Right. like get enough get enough institutions supporting stables, get enough people holding stables, understand where the kinks are kind of like where the gaps may be just like there's gaps in the existing banking system. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And try to optimize for those things to the extent that liquidity remains on chain. I think we'll build a better solution. That's my main motivating factor. Keep the volume on. Spend on chain right in in person. 100%. If we're not doing that, then what the hell are we doing? Yeah. I mean, move the money on chain. Keep it there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, all right. We'll get into Eco. I just got one last question about the the kind of the dual kind of David and Goliath of USC and Tether

here. Uh, we've got both of them have exploded this year. I think they're up to about 250 to uh billion total market cap. I think we I think we could easily get to 1.5 trillion like this time next year. Trillions. Yeah. Yeah. Trillions is like the is like the meme. Plasma is doing well on that meme. People are It's a great meme. I'm glad they're doing it. Trillions. So, we've got the these two which are different strategies and circle was almost rumored to be bought by Ripple which I think that has been put to rest. That would have been a ride. That would have been bad. That would have been a real ride. I would not have been happy about that. But I think they're going to do the IPO. I think Coinbase will I don't know what's going to happen there but you know there was

rumors and then Tether's just kind of gone in more global uh strategy per se and you could also just say a bit more like maverick with regards to the regulatory arbitrage. Yeah. Um, and I think that's paid off just based on total amount uh like supply and whatnot. But you are you seeing it from your perspective because you have a quite a unique uh perspective with regards to chains and you know people actually using these things. What what are you seeing as far as this battle goes? Um you know who's winning or who's got the you know an edge in certain categories. How do you think about and how should we be thinking about USDT versus USDC? I just feel like this is an oversimplification. Uh USDC seems to be winning state side. the most valuable market in the world. USDT seems to be

winning globally. Like simply put, that's okay. Both are enormous markets, right? And both are valuable businesses. I think that USDC is designing toward some assumptions about the stable coin regulatory future in the US to try to entrench their position further. Um, and that market's going to grow a lot. And if they're successful in that, um, I think it's probably strategically a good move. Uh, I think um there are a couple trends I've seen that are different with either one of them that could be interesting from a go to market perspective. I've seen Tether this year support several upstarts and kind of like open standards that extend access to USDT, right? So, we have open USDT, we have USDT0, a few other variants, and

they seem to be leaning into more of this like programmability around Tether and on top of Tether. And I think that that's compelling. I think that I've seen real traction with protocols adopting USDT as a result. Um USDC seems to be going in a slightly different direction. Uh I think they're they're sort of like understand very well that it's a good payment technology and they understand pretty well that uh there needs to be some interest in the equation. And I'm seeing more activity around some concept of uh USDC based consumer plays and USDC based accounts.

So slightly different direction, but if they're able to deploy that in the US, obviously it's going to be very very valuable. And they certainly have, I think, the resources to get that integrated with many of the major fintech consumer apps and sort of related payment platforms, right? We'll see whether they actually sort of are are able to penetrate that, but it's a different strategic bet. And so that's what I see from both of them right now. Um, it's pretty interesting, you know, but I would I would just like overly simplify the equation to to to say I think USDT still wins globally. USDC is entrenching itself in the US and we'll see where the overlap or how much overlap play out, right? Then of course USDT has their their soccer club investments, their farmland in South America, whatever else it may be strategy as

well. Totally. Maybe it'll end up being the Bergkshire Hathaway of the stable coin space in 10 years. Who knows? Um so no comment how those long-term bets play out. That's where I'm seeing the traction right now. And and do you have any thoughts around um USD or these kind of different type of stable coins? these algorithmically backed stable coins or these basis trading stable coins, right? Like USD is actually meant for effectively rate cuts like like if there are rate cuts, USC will do very well and if we get a bull market which we're kind of in, right? So what like it they might be a clear you know number three four or whatever and then there's a bit of a drop off but just curious like your thoughts there and you know on the rest of the landscape. Enormous opportunity.

Yeah. Um and it's sort of like near and dear to my heart. our our like earliest roots are in that early algo stable day sort of of circa 2017 18 right nothing worked but you know we all we all ran some experiments it was great ourselves included right everything was built on Ethereum at that time but like you know I think that was a harbinger for kind of what you can do and Athena's come along the last couple years given like a way more organized and transparent market environment way more liquidity to access and deployed something very elegantly simple and what it did though is it basically like joged stable stablecoin season 2 and that's been amazing right um and so I give them so much credit um for how they've gone about it uh but for

also I think inspiring this sort of like stretch of stablecoin issuance experimentation that we're in today stable coins were dead before that remember like post Terra dead USDT USDC only game in town that experimentation was gone and certainly that dust needed to settle for a little cuz none of the early stuff worked. That was a reckless endeavor. There's some stuff that wasn't reckless that just didn't work as well. But basically the launch of Athena kind of joged stablecoin experimentation again and um they created an incredibly valuable platform themselves. But I also think they also they sort of set kind of this the canvas for a bunch of new entrance, right? some more or less exotic, but um I give them a ton of credit for that and I think they deserve

a lot of credit for in many ways kind of like leading us into this new stable coin era um with a legitimate different model and a like legitimate independent third party entrant. Yeah. To the incumbents that were already here. That's been really exciting to see. And I would expect as eco scales for, you know, USD to become more and more important in a lot of these flows as they continue to kind of deploy in different directions and and get a lot more organic traction. Tired of multi-chain headaches? You need Omni. Omni makes being onchain feel like you're online.

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treasury of billions in stables and ETH capital pools. This entire ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned VCs that are aiming to create the next generation of banking and financial technology. This is Mantle. So when I was um and I appreciate that kind of response because I think that they've done very well as well. Wish I was able to invest back in the day. Um indeed. Um, so when I was originally thinking about kind of RWA and stable coins, you know, let's say in last cycle 2020 21, the thought was it was just going to be Ethereum like there was this like kind of meta that this was only going to be

built on Ethereum because well it's the most censorship resistant, most decentralized, you know, best technology for this kind of like value. But like we're clearly seeing either you know purpose-built chains plasma codeex converge you talked about stable and then you know even you know ethereum salana and then other chains getting uh actual real you know build securitize black rockck etc on them like what went wrong for Ethereum why why were they not able to capture all of that value and why like what makes these institutions want to build either in a multi-chain environment which facilitates what you guys do or on a you know semi-permissioned permissionless chain

environment where they have also kind of a bit more control over. [Music] Um this is like a maybe a little bit of an anti-hot take. I think less went wrong with Ethereum than people blame them for. Yeah, Ethereum is like made remarkable technical progress. I would say what they've done is they focus on the tech for the last few years. rollup road map worked, but it's kind of like we've come out the other side with all this fragmentation stuff to solve. That's fine. Like we're on the technical maturity curve, right? Um and they've solved a ton. Yeah. What they have conceded is a very very aggressive, incentivized, coordinated business development effort to get a lot of those

institutions on chain. They've largely delegated that to the roll-ups themselves or the DeFi protocols, right? Um, you know, just to tie the last answer together, thank God for Athena. Yeah. Right. It's been effectively like a business development arm for Ethereum visa v stable coins. And um, so I just think they've taken a different platform approach. Yeah. I think that you you see in here the social pressure now to organize more of that more of that competitive effort against the other ecosystems. I think they have tons of value yet to capture. And interestingly enough, I think as Ethereum scales, a lot of that is going to come back to mainet. Yeah. Um maybe a little bit of a hot take. I kind of hope it does. Yeah.

Um and so I don't think a ton has gone wrong so much as it's been a difference in focus with a ton of progress sort of on its own merits. Yeah. But um perhaps uh less technically obsessed, more businessorientized competitors have come in along the way and really like you know made some headway. Yeah. And I also think that for the more uh you know kind of like purpose-built chains or for the more specific use case type of chains, it's it's compelling for institutions to be able to have control over like a sequencer or a validator center or whatever it is, right? Yep. 100%. They want to control that. Yeah, that's right. I think there may be that

Ethereum's general purpose nature has probably left the VM not as customizable or sort of uh simplistic as a stablecoin only transaction flow would otherwise require. So there's clearly some optimization there that some other some of these new entrance are trying to make. Yeah. Um but that I mean that's just like I don't think that that's something that's gone wrong. That's just what Ethereum is by design. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you guys have recently put out the um echo portal as like you know it's been a good while there and you guys have been integrating chains um you know making the stable coin transfer experience easy when you're thinking about so one issue that that I've seen

from interrop providers is a lack of what I would call extensibility. Y so you've got you know 10 chains back in 2022 20 chains was like okay we can we can be everywhere. Now there's like hundreds and likely going to be thousands and thousands of like real chains. But as you said, power law will kind of like dwindle and there'll be ones that win and focus on and others that are just kind of more longtail. When you're thinking about um eco and its extensibility, what does that mean to you? Like like how how are you guys going to be able to support the converges, the codeexes, the you know all the individual purpose-built chains for institutions? Do do you guys want to? Yes. Um, and then how does that actually look like from like a strategy perspective? Just show me stable coin

order flow and we'll help it flow. Okay, we'll help it flow better. What I think that looks like from our perspective is a little bit more wholesale. So, kind of the 8020 rule again, I would expect there'll be somewhere like in the realm of 15 to 20 chains you to which tons of stable coin volume, the vast majority of stable coin volume are ultimately settling or sort of happening. And I care most about um tightly coupling those chain ecosystems and squeezing every bit of capital efficiency that we can out of those stable coin flows.

That's what I care the most about. Uh I think that that focus benefits us. It's like a real heristic for us to support new chains, to work with new chains. We're not chasing every next flash in the pan that might come and go. I'm really just focused on where is durable stablecoin liquidity going to be required and where is durable stablecoin demand going to continue to scale and so which which kind of sets us apart. I think a lot of interop is generalized. A lot of it's kind of any token in any chain. A lot of really good tech there. It's not really the game we're trying to play. I'm trying to flow stables along the most valuable routes. And then to the extent we need to get last mile to the hundreds or the thousands of roll-ups or chains that may be single purpose app chains out there, I'll

compose with another protocol that sort of can deliver the stable coin or the liquidity that last mile to do the thing. Yeah. But what I care way more about is kind of like the wholesale flow and settlement among those usual suspect fat chains, some of which already exist, a few more that I think will will sort of attain that status over the course of the next year. Yeah. And and so which chains are those? And and who is using Eco? Right now, I'll take that in reverse order. Yeah. So, right now, Eco tends to be the fastest and cheapest way to move a stable at some size among Ethereum rollups. um you know you'll usually clear that uh in a few seconds for an order sort of an order fee on the on the order of a basis point. Okay. And

okay so who is that and and where where we tend to win on fast and cheap is a,000 bucks and up. Okay. So this is not going to be the person refilling gas for 10 bucks or whatever. You know we're competitive in that realm. But where we mostly see people utilizing this uh are would be intent solvers that are rebalancing. There's some unintentional overlap with Everclear there. It's not trying, that's not our optimization function, but we do see some organic traction there. Um, we see people looping and farming. They're not farming us, but they know that there's sort of some loop that's valuable between a couple protocols on chains we support and that we're the fastest and cheapest way for them to recycle their capital. So, there's a great deal of efficiency in that. Um,

it's kind of the same use case. the more you the more often you can recycle capital, the more you can squeeze more efficiency you squeeze out of it, whether you're an intent sort of solver rebalancing or whether you're sort of professional DeFi farmer that's trying to loop faster than everybody else, right? And then we see of course a bunch of scattershot order flow kind of across the$1 to $10,000 spectrum of people just trying to move between L2s. A couple of those users I know are um kind of like crypto payment checkout type flow providers. they end up unbalanced at the end of the day or the week. Yeah. And they need to move some size to rebalance themselves. Usually 10K to 100K. Um and we can provide that uh sort of on really good terms. So those are the people that

we see utilizing this. Um initially this is a protocol integration. You mentioned portal. We built Portal um just as a way that an average user could hit and try it. Yeah. The product is really what we call routes which is what powers portal underneath but there was no UI for it. So, we built a UI. We think it's pretty slick. We think it's pretty easy. Um, I was a little bit to be honest with you, I was kind of like begrudging about it at first because about the UI about about building it because like bridging is a necessary component to the broader network we were building, but Eco is not just a bridge. And so, I thought if we released a portal UI, we're going to get kind of like pigeon holed into that corner of the market. Yeah. And we fortunately haven't. I think we've been

able to sort of paint the sky on the narrative well enough that people understand that that's sort of one step along the way and it's it's seen some some success. Um and it's certainly led to a lot more volume. So it was the right decision to do it. I was a little bit stubborn in the beginning because I was worried that we would kind of get typ cast a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so that's where we're seeing traction. Um you had a second part of your question. What was it? I just got a bit more of a pointed question and perhaps I'm a little bit ill uh underinformed but I'm just curious. Why would I use eco instead of just using go direct to uh something like a intensebased bridge or like a CCTP for USDC? It is intense based. So you're going to get that type

of user experience. One click stable send faster and cheaper. Okay. Right. Of course with CCTP you're not going to get slippage. You're just going to wait longer. Yeah. It's just different trade-off. Right. So if you're willing to pay the convenience fee effectively of one to five bips to move your money faster, of course a lot of people are. Then you would use something like our solution which is intentbased. And I can talk about why. Um, but if you're moving at size, certainly anything upwards of six figures or more where you can wait 10 to 20 minutes and you don't want the slippage, then that's where CCTP shines. Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned you you guys have prioritized intense. Is that just because you've seen that that's been the best kind of evolution of fast, cheap, bridging with little third party risk? Yes. Um, that's what I thought.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, our vision is a UX vision. Okay. and fast and cheap matters a hell of a lot to good UX. And right now, intents are the best uh or they're sort of like the the best method for ensuring fast and cheap. Incidentally, I think they're also the best the best method for chain expansion and permissionlessness. Um I think you can deploy an intent protocol far and wide faster than you can often deploy uh a native kind of um multi-chain token standard or a native bridge by some other design. And um some people might quibble with that assertion, but I think that that's what that's what the market reflects right now. Yeah. Yep. Um Ron, last one for you. What's the what's the grander vision for Eco? Eco is a stablecoin liquidity network and a

stablecoin transaction protocol. The best way to think about it is what would it look like to have like an interchain Visa? Okay. So, let's think about what Visa does. A lot of times people don't stop and think about this because it's so ubiquitous and it's so easy to use. Yeah. Right. But what is Visa? Visa is a liquidity network foremost. Basically settles payments in dollars among banking systems that don't otherwise interoperate. They don't otherwise talk to each other. Right. We're trying to do something very similar with stables between chains that don't otherwise talk to each other. But also critically, and this is what people underestimate, Visa is also a UX. You're right.

Right. Everywhere in the world, you can swipe or you can tap. That is remarkable. It is amazing that they have been able to abstract all the underlying settlement complexity into that very simplistic interaction across continents and that's what Eco is here to do as well. If you hold a stable coin on chain, like I said before, it should be sufficient to do whatever else you want to do. And I want to enable any arbitrary crosschain action calling to our network and our liquidity to be a one-click stable send. I want to let an app developer only build for that and only care about that very simplistic user tap. and I'm going to let the end user not have to care about the hops in between. One click, full send, um is our tagline. And that's why and I think that that's um you know, as we construct it,

I think it's going to prove to be an incredibly valuable solution on chain sort of with this landscape we find ourselves in with stable coins being the most valuable asset class and with a bunch of chains outside of Ethereum clearly here to stay. And so that's the end vision for Eco. Uh that's what we're ultimately building toward. That's what I think that we'll be able to prove out and realize even within the year. Thanks for joining me today and hope you have a good week in the city, man. Amazing. Love it. Thanks, guys.