What Is Next for Stablecoins

Transcript

I decided to go against the beaten path and just give a keynote without any presentation. So, I'm not going to bother you with slides. And I think I'm doing this consciously for a few reasons. First of all is that I don't need to explain anyone uh what a stablecoin is and how stablecoins are totally revolutionizing finance. The second reason is that, in my opinion, the reasons why we know stablecoins today, so far, is not a good proxy of what stablecoins are going to be in the future.

And the third one is the reasons why we're all here listening to stablecoins, and we were much more of us last year, are actually the wrong reasons. Let me start from the from the final from the last for the final point and going backwards. When we started M0 building infrastructure for stablecoins in early 2023 to 23, nobody cared about stablecoins. And the reason was that there was no money to be made in stablecoins. Stablecoins were a platform that was needed for other people to build very cool stuff on digital rails.

And it was very exciting. So, you could get leverage through a stablecoin, decentralized stablecoin. You could dollars in emerging market. You could trade crypto assets on a stablecoin. And then everything changed. So, interest rates went up, and a company that started as a as an affiliate of an exchange became the most profitable company in the world, and people started paying attention. Then something else happened. And another company that was doing orchestration, or like moving stablecoins around the world at the fringe of finance got acquired by Stripe for 1.1 billion dollars and people everybody started making paying attention.

So a year ago, if you would have come here at Token or in New York uh any panel about stable coins was packed. And it was packed for the wrong reasons. People would just wanted to understand how they could make money. And they had no idea what they were doing with stable coins. They were not even believing in stable coins. They just wanted to make money. And that time has passed very quickly. So most of the issuers in stable coins are actually commoditizing the act of issuance. So you might have seen companies like Stripe announcing and Visa and MasterCard announcing that they will launch a stable coin where 100% of the yield is going to pass down to the distributors. And and the act of orchestration of using stable coins at the fringe to move money

around has been commoditized so much that there is no margin to be made. So stable coins actually went back being the platform that originally were supposed to be. So what is this platform actually allowing us to do? And the what platforms allow us to do is actually to build stuff that is more valuable than the platform itself. And interestingly, we're going back full circle. So stable coins today are actually empowering new new use cases, new financial applications that can be launched super quickly globally to do cool stuff. Let users do cool stuff. So credit cards are powered by stable coins. Neo banks are powered by stable

coins. Yield products are powered by stable coins. Insurance are powered by stable coins. So everything that can actually serve customers is now using stable coins as a piece of software and not like a payment a payment rail necessarily or like a settlement asset. And obviously, when stable coins become software, they evolve. So soft software needs to be programmed, needs to be personalized, needs to be connected with other other pieces of software. And this is what we're doing at M Zero.

At M Zero, we decided to power uh any type of financial use case that exists on the blockchain by creating primitives that facilitate the launch, the bootstrapping, the distribution of the softwares. And this gets me to the second point of my, let's say, preamble. We don't really know what is going to be next for stable coins. What we know is that what is next for stable coins require fully programmable, flexible infrastructure. And that's what we're building.

We're building a canvas that is allowing other entrepreneurs, other inventors, whether humans or machines, to actually use this canvas and create use cases that we we cannot really predict. I'm a I'm a massive believer of machine to machine financial flows. I'm not a believer that an agent is going to just buy tickets on our behalf. It feels a bit like Star Trek. I know what I don't know if you if some of you guys remember the early days of the Star Trek saga where when people in the 2500 were just dressed like folks in the '70s, just a bit more futuristic. I think it's very difficult to predict

what the future is going to entail. What is important is building the infrastructure and the canvas that is allowing this future to happen under our eyes. So, this is what we're doing. And let me spend the last the next like 5 minutes to describe you what we're doing, and then let you think whether the type of products, the use cases that your companies are building can actually use what we're building for you. So, when you're building a financial product that is useful, is going to be useful for a mass market, a global market. There are a lot of pieces that you need that you need to make it real.

The first one, you need the gates. You need to allow users to come into your product, come into your application in a seamless way. I.e. you need liquidity. And today in crypto liquidity is very expensive. And it's very expensive by construct because liquidity providers are actually making a lot of money providing liquidity. And we want to change that. We want to democratize that. So, we're building liquidity primitives that allow any type of financial application to embed a widget and allow users to click, come in with a version of a dollar, whether USDC, USDT, PYUSD or others, and enter your financial application premises seamlessly, atomically, super fast, permissionlessly.

The other thing that you need as soon as the money of your users is inside a financial application is a form of storage. And forms of storage is like few few years ago were very rare. Today are very common. There are so many regulated so-called genius compliant payment stablecoins. So, we're building primitives that are matching all those forms of payment storage in wrappers that are facilitating any use case. We're building de facto tokenized bank accounts for on-chain economy. And then we need we're building features. So, every type of application requires different features.

So, if you're a yield instrument, you require certain certain vaults or liquidity gating or yield passing features. If you're a machine, you require other features. So, we're building those features. And we don't know what those features are. Every every day that we're talking to builders, they come come up with our requests, more requests. We build those require for those requests and we put them in a menu. So, as stuff as things get more open, as more of the use cases are coming on chain. We're building a longer and longer menu of features that are facilitating creativity of builders.

So, it is actually very exciting to be back in a world where most of the tourists in crypto are not here in stablecoin panels, but are in other panels, AI panels, or you name it. Because finally, we can go back talking not about the settlement asset, but about what it empowers, what other people are building on top. We just want to build seamless, neutral, invisible infrastructure that works. we think the next few years are going to be the real golden age of digital money. If digital money enters into seamless up financial applications, becomes invisible behind the front end, just make global first, immediate infrastructure and products

available to everyone, and actually delivers what the crypto the crypto ethos has always been since the very beginning, which was not creating a lot of like massive centers of profit, but creating open infrastructure to allow compo- composable, open financial use cases for everyone. So, if you think that what we're building can interest you, if we think that what we're building can power what you're building for your customers, you should come and reach out. You should go on x.m0.org or x.m0.org. You should talk to our product teams. You should talk to our engineering teams, and we'll make sure to make it real.

So, thanks. Uh thanks for for paying attention. I'm not here to tell you what is next for stables. I'm here to empower you to actually make it real. I'm just building the base layer. Thanks a lot.