Why Every Fintech Is Racing To Launch Stablecoins with Rodri Fernandez

Transcript

This stack is such that you can use you know simple web to APIs you don't need any blockchain engineers [music] and you know with a couple of people you can put together like a very sophisticated uh product with much more functionality and go live in like in like weeks. >> What do you think is going to be the biggest zero to one that still is yet to happen uh that can happen and you will try to make happen over the next 1, three, five years? >> Welcome back to the rule. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. >> Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world.

>> Sit back, relax, and enjoy it. Mr. Rodri Fernandez on Cross Mint. Uh, guys, I'm super stoked. We've been trying to get Rodri booked for a while and uh, man, we were just saying everyone wants stable coins these days. You just got back from Money 2020. That's a little bit more of like a It's not necessarily a cryptonative conference. It's it's a bit more of a a fintech conference broadly. What were your takeaways? What did you hear about the sentiment around stable coins while you were at Money 2020?

So you're right that it's a traditional fintech conference, but honestly this time to me it felt like a crypto conference because >> everyone is thinking about stable coins. Uh the audience primarily of the of the of the conference is traditional payment infrastructure companies, banks and so on. And the main takeaway is that every single one of them pretty much is thinking about stable coins. And those who don't, they're feeling an insane amount of FOMO right now and they're rushing to get one of the door.

>> And I think there is honestly a very big risk that those who don't will be pretty much left behind with products that aren't competitive anymore. And so it's a it's a really fascinating time. I think you know the use cases three years ago of crypto were like very different to the one ones today. Today it's mostly, you know, B2B, money movement, remittances, payroll, and so on. And and it's really cool to see them all come to life after, you know, so many years of all of us working hard the rest, >> dude. I mean, it's incredible. You have uh worked with and partnered with so many great companies. We we'll get into some of that. This segment is sponsored and powered by Polygon. Uh it's the

money moves fast segment. Polygon has all kinds of uh stable coins, payments. I think they're the number one leader in payments uh right now um for uh especially non USbased transactions. They've got tons of tons of adoption happening in Latin America as well as in Asia and and Europe. Uh and so uh I I'm curious because Cross has partnered with uh uh Moneygram as of recently. Moneygram is typically someone uh that moves money but not quickly, right? And so on this segment, money moves fast. I I'm curious to learn about how you've upgraded money grams technology and infrastructure so that crossber

remittances are now able to be done quickly. How were you able to make moneygrams move fast? >> Yeah. Uh so [clears throat] the historical flow of remittances for these type of companies like like Monogram is you go to a store you give cash and then that gas moves through swift and a network of correspondent banks and depending on what is the exact corridor you know it takes quite a bit of time and money for the money to get there and then the recipient they also go to a physical location and they pick up the cash. Um the system you know was built like quite a few years ago and today thanks to stable coins you can do something that is radically much better and so the new flow with money is uh you pay in in

whichever way you want. You can pay in in person too or via via app. Uh that money is converted into stable coins. It's moved instantly to the destination into a wallet that is created for the recipient in the new monogram app. And now the recipient doesn't matter where they are in the world. they can access dollars. Many people in emerging markets, they're completely excluded from financial services. They're stuck with currencies that devaluate and suffer from uh pretty deep in inflation, which means that it's very difficult for them to save and and and build like a prosper economic life. And so now anyone anywhere in the world can access dollars, they can access other type of services like yield on those savings eventually trading and a few other

things. And then they have the optionality to offramp back into cash through a physical location as they were doing before or keep it as dollars and use it to do peer-to-peer payments, buy services and so on and so forth. And so we're seeing like uh you know crossber payments is basically one of the use cases that have had the highest program market fit and similar to monogram like now like you know so many other remittance companies are announcing things but it's really cool to see monogram be a pioneer a company that is you know about 100 years old and be able to build this in like in two months basically we went from like you know signing contract to two months after then being able to have a product lab in production with like two engineers from

their side and so I think it will be a case study for the books that people will be looking at one of the most incredible transformations in the history of finance uh taking you know uh and it's really cool the team there is like absolutely amazing they're moving so fast and they're trying to be like a stable coin first company which is you we should get them guys into the into the podcast if >> we should absolutely would love would love to have them on the show um and you know they've been around for so long they're so deeply entrenched in people's minds is the go-to place to do some of these remittances around the world and and they sort of just flipped the switch. I'm curious why did they flip the switch? You know, we get incremental uh improvements, [snorts] you know, as

technology advances. Why haven't they done this before? Why why did they choose to do this now with Crossman? So Monogram had a few stable coin related products before. Uh, the main one allowed people to send stable coins to monogram and then off those funds via physical locations. So, basically they're opening up their liquidity network and physical network of agents uh to any wallet who wants to do that. Uh, but they hadn't like truly mastered this like embedded wallet experience.

Part of the reason I think that is that historically the UX of wallets was not fantastic. >> And so, you know, whether it's pass phrases or, you know, security risk or like all of these annoying transaction pop-ups and right now the uh the tech stack has evolved so much that it's possible to build non-custodial global from the one applications with like absolute zero complexity to the end user. To the end user, it just looks like a normal app. There's like dollars in there. It's fast. Uh it's secure. H it just happens to be like yeah cheaper and money arrives faster that otherwise it would. So um that's probably that's probably it. And then there's obviously like developer infrastructure

historically was like pretty complicated. If you're going to build something like this, you needed to orchestrate 10 different providers. Uh you need the stable orchestration in the on and off ramps. You need the water infrastructure. you need like RPCs, data APIs, anti-moneyaundering, travel rule and so if you're an enterprise and you have to import different vendors to be able to build the solution, the project is dead from day one. M >> so right now the stack is such that you can use you know simple web two APIs you don't need any blockchain engineers and you know with a couple of people you can put together like a very sophisticated uh product with much more functionality and go live in like in like weeks and then obviously like blockchains like

polygon like now it's it's possible to transact um uh faster cheaper at much higher throughput that before it was very difficult to support enterprise rate and scale type of applications uh and now can and I think you know you've seen uh massive amounts of spikes of activity things like I know like the traming coin and so on like you know supporting throughputs sometimes even higher than what miscar do so uh it's uh it's very exciting. >> Yeah. Yeah, it certainly is and we're seeing more and more robustness and more volume taking place on Polygon as well as around Ethereum and other chains as well. It was $500 million that was moving on polygon the other day. Uh and

this is facilitated by enterpriseg grade security as well as high throughput like you said to support remittances which requires a lot of bandwidth a lot of throughput a lot of transactions on a short amount of time and and the network can get very congested if it's not if it's not built properly. uh when it comes to money gram lots of again lots of transactions lots of throughput and they've been you know they they've sort of gone through some of the evolutions the last question I have about money is you know again why you know they have the ability to upgrade you know their technology on a pretty consistent basis uh and in this way they you know have digital dollars now they have this application and this wallet um why do you think they jumped all the way to

stable coins why didn't they utilize the existing you know, Swift banking system kind of allow people to, you know, send money digitally first and and you know, now they've jumped all the way to stable coins. Was it sort of an incremental approach or did they go all the way from like physical cash, physical store all the way to stable coins like you said, two months uh and it only took two engineers? Yeah, I mean to me is that uh trying to build this with fiat rails is like getting a horse that is slightly better and doing on stable coins is like getting a Formula One.

>> Yeah. >> And so why like in terms of like performance but then also in terms of like difficulty to build is that it's so much easier to build these products now with stable coins. You have all of the regulatory arbitrage. You can build non-custodial wallets that are alive anywhere in the world from day one without having to worry about all of the different local uh compliance requirements uh and different local providers because there's no one who can give you embedded financial services all over the world. That's just for holding balances. Then you have like money movement obviously it's just like impossible to build anything remotely as high performant as fast as costefficient as moving money with stable coins. Um, and then there's the composibility aspect too. Once you

have stable coin accounts for your users, then you can plug in all sort of financial services on top without needing to do all of these complicated integrations and have all of these different providers. You can provide yield natively to your users just because there's money being held in the account that's already put at work in uh, you know, bonds that generate yield that you can either keep as a provider or give back to your users. You can add things like trading of tokenized stocks. You can allow someone that is in say Colombia or South Africa to be able to buy Tesla stock or you know open AAI stock. uh you can give basically very sophisticated financial products that otherwise are number one just impossible to access to to a lot of these consumers

and number two to that faster cheaper and compliantly and that's why I think like all of these fintex are jumping on board now because just like so much radically better technology that uh is about to eat finance in payments >> man it's incredible uh you were named named Cross Mint was named as one of the top 100 fintech companies of 2025. Congratulations. It's incredible achievement. And there's other stable coin providers on there, but generally what we're seeing is that stable coins as a category is increasing. Crypto payments infrastructure as a category is increasing. You were up there with the

likes of BVNK and uh you know uh Red Pay, Rain, Transact, all of these guys. uh you know BVNK is in discussions to potentially get acquired for$ two billion dollars. Um how do you think this is going to progress and evolve as crypto payments infrastructure becomes one with the best of the best in fintech? You know these two worlds were very very separate for a long time. Money 2020 like you said was almost almost felt like a crypto conference this year.

How do you think these two worlds will converge when ultimately this just becomes it's not deep defi and tradi it's just finance right it's not uh these two worlds aren't separate anymore they ultimately become combined how do you think things will look different will they feel different how do you think the UX might change what do you think is going to be different as these two worlds converge >> yeah number one I would say for these two worlds to converge there must be no differences in UX whatsoever For users, it doesn't matter if it there stable coins. What they care about is like is my money safe? What fees am I paying to move it? What additional financial services I'm getting? And if those happen to be on stable coins is is

good for them. Uh but but they don't need to know. And that's something like what we as a company aspire to do. We abstract all of that complexity for both for people on both sides. Um, let's say that as you pointed out, there's not going to be like fintech apps and stable coin apps that are separate category. There's just going to be like, you know, fint apps and and stable coins are just going to be another additional rail that is going to be added to the stack. For some things, at least temporarily, fiat may be better. If you want to send money from the US to Europe, for example, you don't really need to do stable coins unless the money will stay in stable coins on both sides at either side of

the transaction. uh but over time yes I think over time most most volumes and most balances will be eventually held on on on some type of stable coin uh balance but in the short term it's just going to be another rail and it's just going to look for users exactly the same and every single thing the company is going to have uh some type of stable coin component whether that is for like payments whether it's for like account balances or other type of of infrastructure >> the wait is [music] over the talis TestNet is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now [music] at testnet.talis.network.

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Trading on fire. >> Another thing that's happening is right. We're we're we're scaling. We're integrating these systems, these wallet infrastructures. These these companies already have massive distribution and so now we're sort of integrating the technology at the base layer. I I'm curious how how do you think this is going to scale? What comes next once we integrate stable coins, crypto payments, wallet infrastructure into the back end of MoneyGram and YRX and all of these amazing partners that you guys have had.

Uh what what comes Oh, did we do we lose it? No. Okay, we're good. uh what what comes next right as as we as we get more and more integrated into some of the largest players with massive distribution what are some of the other things that you guys are targeting as a business >> yeah for sure so that is the first I think like angle through which to see it is like this uh battle between enterp existing companies adop instead of coins versus new entrance then you have sort of like what is the sequence of innovation and the different steps that are going to be happening over time uh in something like today most of the market is focused on like the very basics right especially on the enterprise side they're thinking like okay how can I launch a wallet how can I allow users to have deposits and how can

I start to give yield and so on how do can I issue cards for users to spend those stable coin balances how can I allow these users to connect their wallet to a third party site to be able to make the payments and bypass visa master card and get like better fees as a result over time more sophisticated embedded financial services start to to to appear right well after the basics have been solved and so there you to have like very like now for example because you have access to more data because of onchain transaction activity you have ways to do alternative credit scoring for giving loans to people for example or you have uh the the tokenization of the world basically every single financial asset is getting tokenized so you're going to be start

you're going to start seeing this embedded trading services absolutely everywhere you have prediction markets sort of like exploring right now and you have you know the betting for like uh or information markets at which I I think to in some other way to to look at it they start to also be embedded and trickled down everywhere. So basically it's the full tokenization of the world finalization and then that trickling out and getting embedded everywhere thanks to all of these composible assets and be made accessible to people all over the world. I predict that you will start to see much more dollararization of emerging markets which >> will have a lot will give a lot of opportunity to people will also probably create a lot of cont conflicts locally

in some places because of the inability to do monetary policy potentially spiraling down of like local currencies and things like that. And so that's also something to watch for that I think maybe people don't talk about so much. Mhm. >> Um, and then on the regulatory side, I think we're still a bit in like the wild west where there's a lot of companies who are doing things right, but there's also a lot of companies, especially more on the cryptonative side, which are probably not spending enough time on on the compliance and regulatory side. And I think that we all as an industry need to need a bit more professionalization.

>> Yeah. Uh I think probably over 80% of especially the crypto native apps are engaging in a license money transmission because the way they're setting up their wallets and I think that all of that needs to change. >> Yeah. And I think further regulation as well as uh compliance with the existing laws. Uh this is going to uh end up putting everyone on a on a even playing field and uh builders such as yourself and Crossman can help people become compliant by doing things the right way. Um, I I'm curious as as uh I think about the business plan of you guys and you're you're helping a lot of these companies.

I'm curious why did you decide not to go the stable coin issuance route? Uh I I I'm just looking at Tether achieving 10 billion dollars in profit in 2025. Obviously not, you know, you can't there's only one Tether, right? Uh they became the 17th largest US Treasury holder. Um you mentioned global dollarization that could have some polarizing effects uh especially in emerging markets. How how do you think about uh the stable coin issuance scheme and then all of the infrastructure that's built around uh the stable coin issuers?

>> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that [clears throat] you will have probably a small pretty limited set of institutions who are issuers of e like public stable coins of sorts. By public or ecosystem stable coin I mean a stable coins that is use outside of your own existing app. Uh so think of like circle with USDC, tether, uh USDG, Western Union just announced their own stable coin and a few others. uh that only makes sense I think to a small set of users because who's going to want to hold your statement right like the reality is okay if you're Apple if you're Google I think that that game makes sense for most companies I think and enterprises what they care about is

to get the deal while the funds is in the under ecosystem so they have the optionality to decide whether they want to keep it or they want to give it away and I think the today [clears throat] the market is still a little bit like early but probably what you will see is like let's say I'm an app I think cap. As soon as funds hit those wallets, they're automatically uh turned into a stable coin that is economically neutral to having my own stable coin. >> Um, and so what this means is that I get the yield anyway, but I don't have to go through the hassle of creating my own stable coin and so on and so forth. And then when the money needs to get out, you swap it back into USDC or USDT or one of these other like typical ones.

And so uh basically providers like us what we're doing and enabling is like if you're using our wallet infrastructure and the funds are held inside of those wallets we're able to give you the yield one way or another and then you don't have to worry about all of the complexity of using your own stable coin. Um the stable coin market is really big obviously had going on like before tether existed that you know that that was an option that obviously is very appealing you know it's probably the most efficient capital efficient company in the world. >> Yeah. Um but but there's only one tether as you pointed out. So >> yeah, Tether, hyperlid, and uh only fans, right? Most efficient companies in the world. It's incredible. Um yeah, man. I I I I'm curious what you think is still missing. Like it it feels like

we've come such a long way. I continue to look at, you know, things coming along the newswire and it's every day. It's partnership, major bank, major uh uh fintech, major um you know, remittance payment provider. All of these are now coming into the crypto world. They're integrating the technology and they're they're exposing stable coins to billions of people worldwide. What do you think is still missing? Is it regulatory? Uh it what is it technology? Is it engineering problems? Is it social coordination? What do you think is going to be the biggest zero to one that still is yet to happen uh that can happen and you will try to make happen over the next one, three, five years?

So the main thing right now is I think adoption. So in in time like we're completely rewriting the entire financial system. There's like so many different stakeholders involved. uh organizations that are like pretty old uh have their old ways and so changing everything sustain literally every other day you have one of these major financial institutions announce something new and so I [clears throat] think that uh we're in an amazing track and like in one two years you're going to be we're going to look back and be like them like a year ago no one was thinking about stable coach now everyone is everyone is building and the next year is going to be about deployment and all of these announcements that are

getting out getting them actually live getting them uh be used by users. One of the main things I think about stable coins is that they're extremely efficient I think like cross border and they're also extremely efficient when the funds stay on stable coins before and after. So I think like for that to truly manifest itself what we need is like more emergent acceptance of stable coins more consumer adoption so that uh day-to-day payments uh start to go more into stable coins. Um and then internationally there also needs to be a bit more regulatory clarity on like which regimes uh and you know jurisdictions will apply to or regulations will apply to each specific jurisdiction. But all in all I think we're like an amazing track. The world is like changing at a speed that is unprecedented and now it's going to be

accelerated even further with AI agents. AI agents today they have become absolutely amazing at writing code, doing research and and so on but they're not economic actors. they will become economic actors. They will start intermediating most economic activity. And when they do that, stable coins are a much better primitive to do so than traditional financial rails which just simply do not work for for agents. And when that happens, then you're combining the the speed of transformation of crypto and AI, which is is like a you know atomic bomb. So I'm very excited for that to happen in the next year.

>> Yeah. I uh had a conversation with Eric from Coinbase, who was the the creator of X42, the uh the standard that allows agents to pay one another. Uh and he was describing how um this opens the ability for agents to coordinate with other agents for pieces of work and make purchases for that work. For instance, we, you know, right now need a human in the loop for uh the ability to uh call an API because we need an API key and most of the time it requires a purchase.

Um, and so X42 allows us to to use uh stable coins to pay for some of the things that AI agents can go and use to continuing uh their their work without requiring a human to step in and intervene and make that purchase. I'm curious how you think the AI agent economy will evolve because it feels like, you know, we're kind of on this on this on this path uh where we're headed towards agents interacting with one another on a very recurring basis using a lot of transactions uh to to process uh payments with one another and pay for pay for work uh and pay for subscriptions and API keys and all these

things. Um, and maybe they'll even prompt us as humans to to provide something that they can go and do. So, how do you think the agent economy, the machineto-achine economy is going to evolve? How how do you think that, you know, they're going to use stable coins that these agents are going to use stable coins? Why is that good for the economy, for agents to have more efficient payment methods and for agents to use stable coins to transact between each other? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. So maybe let me start by saying where the where the market is today and then from there expand to where I think maybe it's going and what are the main use cases. So today I think like you see two main applications. The first one is aentic commerce and so this

is you're talking to an agent >> uh and either you being present or autonomously the agent go and makes purchases on your behalf. So think of I want to fly to money 2020 Europe in four months monitor prices if it drops or that this price is buy it for me you don't have to go through the hustle then change my you know uh seat uh ask for a refund whatever so that is like that cluster of of agentic commerce which applies both to purchases of physical goods or services as well as like API consumption which is what X42 has been doing a lot of the second cluster of activities were on agenda finance So you could have like your own personal financial advisor that you ask to to do trades and things like that. And the

beauty there is like like on anything you can only do so much on the real state of a website, right? You can maybe let's say you're trading, right? Like you can make a market order, a limit order. took a couple of things but you cannot make like sophisticated uh requests for let's say monitor what this Twitter account is doing and based on those uh you know outputs or inputs uh make you know this this thing or you know um copycat this other trade account or you know whatever it is you can just not do those things simply from the real estate and of a website and now with LLM you can do anything you like and so those I think are like sort of like the two use cases that we're seeing today the market is relatively early and all

of the standards are getting developed but there's there's products out there that people can use like we at Crosswind the the role we play on it is we provide simple APIs to build into aic use cases so everything from allowing agents to hold funds to moving money make payments and so on we have an API that allows an agent to buy billions of items from Amazon Shopify and so on with stable coins or if they want to also with cards we partner with like Visa Mastercard for their new tokenization initiatives So this is like today anyone can go and they can use it. So sort of um but I think like for this to evolve we need like number one better consumer trust that if you're going to be making a request to an agent that you know they don't go and do something stupid. Uh and

I think there's especially when you do these things with stable coins you can embed programmable wire rails into the contract cryptographically that limit what the agent can do. even if the AI was to hallucinate, they actually cannot do those things because it's programmed into the code that they're not able to do them. >> And so you probably will start seeing more like user present type of use cases where let's say you're talking to the chat GP of the world and it's like buy me a shoe and you buy directly from there instead of being taken to the website and manually have to complete and then from there once more confidence start to get built then you will start to see more autonomous use cases especially for the use cases that are more painful today. So say like you know buying a flight and then over over time

like confidence continue to get build and you see more. We use it internally to give you an example of something very practical that we use today in the company is we have a slack bot that we programmed in like an hour that allows any employee to request the restocking of office supplies. It's like we're out of toilet paper buy one and it goes and it buys it from Amazon. And so we have a vault. We fund the agent with a little bit of money and then we provide an instructions as to how much and which type of items people can buy and we say from having the office assistant reply three hours later uh you know all the back and forth it's so much more efficient and so you will see non-exlosion I think of like especially a lot of B2B probably some use cases but

also consumer narrowly focused applications that I think are very exciting and very useful from day one you can building an afternoon. >> Yeah. Yeah. What what uh what is that tool called? Is that something you guys built yourself? Uh because I I have a feeling others are are uh would would definitely get some use out of it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Our intern built it in an hour with with our own APIs. Uh if anyone is interested in exploring use cases, happy to share guides and so on. Just DM me whatever. Uh you can actually do like drag and drop automations and connect like similar to like Zappier.

You can be like okay connect uh you know my payroll system to this or you know the let's say you have a a slack channel for like finance requests like if a user request say a card for like travel if it miss these rules then automatically disor funds >> and provide like a card or whatever you can do all of that >> uh today and it's like really easy like an hour you don't need to know how to code it's fascinating but this hasn't trickled down yet into the world I don't think people realize everything that is possible >> right and it's coming >> blockchain shortcuts templates and widgets Launch without friction for builders by builders. Visit enso.build.

Asset [music] management redefined. Built on ERC7621. Standardize how you launch, manage, and trade [music] onchain baskets. This is Alvara, the standard for onchain asset management. >> And so right now those integrations do not use stable coins or or do they do use stable coins? >> Yeah, they use stable coins. The problem with fiat I think that existent you know we're trying to help solve and working you know closely with like visa Mastercard for that part but I think is that the entire payment stack the entire financial system was built to prevent automated usage because automated usage is usually fraud >> usually people with using stolen credit cards to buy things and the downside of chargebacks is too big

>> that you don't want to open the gates >> and so if you're let's say a you uh you know trying to use an agent to buy something on a website, you get stuck with like the uh you know anti- anti-bot like cloud for protection. You're stuck with like recaptures. You're stuck with like let's say the user let's say the agent makes a purchase and then the user doesn't like it and they get a charge back. Who's responsible? Is it the user? Is it the agent developer? Is it the the merchant? And if chargeback spike then the cost trickle down across everyone from the issuing bank of the card to the e-commerce site and so on. So you have basically 10 different providers on each single website that all they do is try to prevent uh automate uh like

fraudulent card purchases and now instead of that you can just have a simple API that you just call and bypasses that entire financial system that we think is going to take too long to evolve to actually settle with the merchant and that I think it's life today is really fascinating and I think again like similar you see both in parallel you see like people including us trying to build stable coin solutions while also all of us try to make the existing system adapt and we'll see which solution matters for us we're agnostic we don't care we're uh powering sort of like both flows and and you know letting the market and time decide what flow actually becomes better over time >> absolutely well you guys are doing a great job obviously uh and clearly

through the partner channels that you have built money wirex they're facilitating billions of dollars um on a recurring basis these are some of the biggest fintexs and payment providers in the world and you are the one to integrate CrossMint into uh their platform. So, congrats on all the success. Keep up the great work. It's absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for coming on the show and uh and helping us understand and navigate the world of stable coins. Uh this is the stable coin super cycle and uh money moves fast. So, thank you so much.

>> See you. >> Cheers, man. Talk to you soon. Cheers. I see you.