The New Money Stack: Where Fiat Meets Crypto

Transcript

Thank you so much all for being here. I am super excited to tell you a bit more about how we are thinking about stable coins as part of our uh stack and the way we're building generally at Stripe. Um so generally I'm Henry. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Privy and I happen to uh run Privy as a wholly owned subsidiary within Stripe where I also manage a lot of our work in crypto and stable coins. Generally, our sort of contention is that crypto and stable coins are going to be essential drivers for money on the web in the coming decade. Uh they're going to enable businesses to go global faster, grow their geographic footprint, and enable institutions and agents alike

to move money really easily, whether that's billions of dollars moving around or fractions of a cent. And the results are already here today. You can see we have, you know, over $300 billion in stable coin circulation. 400 billion have gone into payments over the last 8 months. And we're seeing a massive growth in card settlement rates happening on stable coin rails. And generally the huge amount of activity happening on chain like the stuff that Jesse was just talking about. Generally this is showing up in our usage and our customers as well. Um we are seeing a huge number of companies uh across over 180 markets using stable coins as part of their core financial

infrastructure to grow their businesses faster than they could before. And this means really using stable coin infrastructure to enable four key verbs. This is holding stable coins, moving them, um, enabling stable coins spent anywhere in the world and growing them. And this is what I want to talk to you about today. Now, the really cool thing about Stripe's work in this space is that we have a very unique agreement in that we have two core missions. First, we want to enable users to build with the stack. This is a stack that we're using ourselves, but we want to build the best stablecoin developer platform out there. And second, interestingly, is we actually want to incorporate the

stack within Stripe products themselves. This means enabling stable coins side by side with fiat in a way that's completely invisible to the end user. So, they don't have to think about the rails at all. They can just use whatever is the shortest path to bringing value to the end consumer. And I think this is a a part of how we work that's particularly interesting, which is to say we're not just a developer tooling company obviously, but we build products with the tooling that we put out. And in that sense, we consume the same products that we're giving uh developers and users alike. And as part of this talk, I really want to focus on the first aspect, which is how are we thinking about building a developer platform in our space. And so with that, I'm going to go into our platform. Um to me the

story goes back to a little over a year ago. I was working with a great builder at CLA and he was very excited about using Privy uh and thought you know Privy is great for wallets. You guys have an insane number of customers. You you work you know more than 15 billion in transactions every month. You're moving very well. But my core issue is I do not care about stitching together various components as part of a stableoint stack myself. I want to build with a single piece of infrastructure that works end to end. Um so his core issue in a few words was I like you guys but privy needs friends.

Luckily today we have a huge number of friends as part of our work within stripe and in general um privy comes as part of an endto-end platform. So you have privy, stripe and bridge serving their respective customers enabling wallets orchestration cards so you can get an endto-end experience and we work closely with uh tempo on a payments based blockchain and with open standard on basically building a stablecoin ecosystem that actually gives back to the users and the point is to enable endto-end journeys so that our friends uh like my friend Ludo at CLA doesn't have to think about adopting uh each of these components one by And ultimately this is the platform that

we're building. At its core it has three capabilities. Wallets, so people, businesses, and agents can hold and manage stable coins at scale. Orchestration, so we can connect digital and fiat assets uh really closely together. So you can move basically from traditional rails to onchain rails across any asset chain or currency. Um and finally, cards. So users can spend their stable coin or crypto holdings really easily anywhere. you know, Visa and Mastercard are accepted. Now, our core remit is to leverage this stack inside of Stripe itself. This means enabling crypto for payments so that merchants can accept stable coins anywhere they accept fiat already and in a far greater

set of geos too. It means remittances so you can pay out globally using these rails really, really easily. It means neo bankanking enabling folks to store and hold assets as well as actually uh enabling earnings and rewards on top of these assets. It means inapp finance with simple on-ramps into stable coin and crypto rails. And finally, it means better control over your corporate treasury via issuing your own stable coins. Now, the cool thing about this obviously is that within the Stripe stack, we're actually building the endto-end platform. And part of what I want to talk to to you guys about today is how are we thinking about building

this core platform so that you can choose to use it as a whole or use it in parts. And this is the main duality I think that's very interesting about the work that we're doing, which is to say again, we're building developer tooling. We're building the stack itself component by component. We're also trying to make it a cohesive hole. So you don't have to think about these components if you don't want to. As crypto moves from serving sort of the early adopter community to an early majority in fintech, most institutions do not want to think about the components themselves. And so it's a real challenge for us to try and work this duality in a cohesive way. So with that, I'm going to spend the rest of my time breaking down principles that we use to build this. Well, maybe the first

principle is to focus on utility. At Stripe, we do not care about building crypto for crypto's sake. We're not wed to the method. And I think the point is to build with the fundamental tool that will deliver the most value for our users. This means using fiat where it matters most. This means using crypto where it matters most. But the point is to create real solutions for problems that our users are facing. And so all of our product decisions ultimately have to be measured by the impact that they create for the end user, not via any constraint that we have on the tool set that we have to pick. And so this means really focusing on helping companies like Meta or Felix Pago pay out to users all over the world in real time. So

Felix Pago for instance enables faster, cheaper crossber payments via WhatsApp. And they can only do this thanks to stable coins. Um but if they'd wanted to use any other rail, that would have been great too. And this gets me to my second point and second maybe principle which is to really marry crypto and traditional rails seamlessly. This isn't about either or. Again, we're not wed to a specific buildout shape or tool stack. It's essential we think that crypto and fiat be in uh be deeply interoperable. Customers understandably do not want to have to rip out their stack in order to grow their business and they shouldn't have to. And this is an area where Stripe can actually do unique things

given the work that Stripe has done the last 15 years building on traditional financial rails. So I'll take an instant an example here. Stripe has issued more than 400 million cards to date. Works with you know the likes of Navan and Ramp and many other large businesses on uh credit card issuing programs. And this is expertise that we can bring into stables as well. And so Ram, for example, is using Stripe across both fiat and stable coin card issuing programs where they're able to have the two work seamlessly side by side to grow their global footprint. This is a a core part of of I think what we uniquely enable.

The third principle is enabling endto-end experiences. So again, a lot of builders want to build with components of the stack, but others just want to think about the user experience from end to end rather than having to think about stitching together disparate components. Ostensibly, this is an area where we have a lot of work to do still. And I think it generally in the space thinking about the user experience rather than the tool set is a huge area of growth that we need. But for us, this really means thinking about this from a user first standpoint. If you bring financial services into a product in a way that you couldn't before, how do you actually enable a user journey that feels cohesive where the seams of the stack don't show? And so here an example I really like is working with deal um

deal enables global payroll for companies and using our stack they've been able to grow to over 80 countries for their end users. And so this is contractors getting paid and using wallets orchestration cards being able to hold a stable coin balance in app being able to earn on top of the stable coin balance and being able to spend down with it really really easily and the point again is that the user doesn't care about the stack so much as they want to get value out of it. So as tool builders we have to think about their experience as an end user. Finally we have two more. The first is embracing open systems. One of the things that's so unique about the space is that crypto enables open tooling and

very very modular rails and we have to embrace that tooling. Ultimately a developer should be able to use the whole system they want to or they should be able to use those parts if they prefer. This is essential because um user needs are very different from geo to geo from buildout to buildout and you should be able to pick the stack that is best for your users. And this means that you can use the the stack that stripe uses using bridge privy open standard tempo or you can use for instance bridge with fireblocks or you can use privy with a USDC on salana build and that should work absolutely beautifully and it does. But again making sure that the products stand on their own at each layer and that they layer together super well because they were meant to be used

together is an absolute key driver of our work. Finally, this is uh very self-s serving as well as a side note because it's it's by enabling these tools to work really well together or separately, we make sure that they can be used as part of configurations we haven't thought of before. So, for example, uh looking at agentic usage in the future, it's really really essential that we enable very very flexible tooling. Finally, this is last um we want to lead with compliance. Um internet money crypto is global by default. It has no boundaries but it is used locally and in that sense it's essential that we work within the bounds of what merchants developers and users

are working within. So we have to work with uh the regulatory frameworks in place in every geo that we serve. And so in that sense this means our working very closely in uh the US and the UK in Europe in Asia in Singapore to make sure that we're setting up rails that are compliant and that developers can trust to scale their businesses with. And ostensibly this is one area where I'm really really excited to be here in Singapore because we know we have a ton of work to do in uh in Apac uh working with developers. And so with that we use these five principles to build a single platform that enables you to hold move and grow money. This means accepting money and stable coins from customers

globally. It means holding and managing these currencies for users, businesses and agents. moving them across borders really easily across currencies and rails, earning on the balances, and finally spending anywhere that cards are accepted. The hope obviously is that this is a very positive sum game. It isn't a stable coins or fiat game. It's not one or the other, but it's both. And we think the opportunity is to basically extend traditional fiat rails and grow the opportunity set for the businesses that we serve. Um, we think that in the next 3 years, 5 years, we'll see an expansion of these rails into every product that uses financial services at

all. And really the disappearance of crypto into the fabric of the product itself, where the user doesn't need to know about the stack that they're using in order to use it. This means businesses going global faster than they could. means developers being able to build with the core sort of money verbs as part of their products in a way that they couldn't before where they had to send users out of the app and it means enabling users to come up with new business models to empower their agents to transact securely on their behalf. So with that we have a lot to build in the uh months and years ahead and we'd love to talk to you. We're uh on the back left over there if you want to come see us and thank you so much for your time.