Hey, folks, we are recording at stable Coin Summit NYC, co hosted by PayPal and Borderless Xyz. And joining me is Kevin Latinity, who is the CEO of Borderless Xyz.
Kevin, great to see you. It's always good to see you, Tony.
Kevin. Excited chat with you because there's so much happening in the stable coin market and building, and you guys are leading on many fronts. But let's kick it off with this summit. Tell us about the collaboration.
So this is the fourth event now that we've put together in a series where our core products, as you know from some of our previous discussions, is all about connectivity.
Right.
We created the first stable coin payments network in January of last year, and then Circle jumped in in July, Fireblocks jumped in after that CPN and the Fireblocks network for payments. And it's always been obvious to us that connectivity shouldn't be just a product, it should be the core of Borderless's DNA and our culture. So what better way to support a product of connectivity than by connecting
people in real life. And we've hosted this now in San Francisco and con in Las Vegas, from Money twenty twenty and this is now the first time in New York where we try to bring together the best in the stable coin world for our quarterly client partner, you know, kind of ecosystem events. And we're incredibly fortunate that the folks at PayPal are jumping in with us this time around and are supporting kind of the stable coin world.
Oh absolutely, And I'm looking forward to the panels and the talks that are happening here today where there's lots of different folks in different walks and different markets, you know, who are going to be talking about how stable coin stable coins.
It's because we are being.
Used across the globe to facilitate payments and much more. And it seems like the saying stable coins are the killer app a blockchain is becoming true and truer. You're just seeing incredible adoption.
It's true and truer.
So I, you know, was maybe slightly an early adopter in the sense that I've been working on table coins for a decade now, come twenty twenty six, and it's a really long time to say stable coin adoptions coming next year, But I feel like we're finally starting to see that and you know, even just in the past six months really since the passing of the Genius Act, We're seeing Zell announce a stable coin, the largest peer
to peer money movement really in the US. We're seeing Western Union announce a stable coins, right, which is kind of like one of the largest, you know, international money movers in the world. We're seeing Swift announce a blockchain initiative at their conference. All this stuff is starting to happen, and we're only six months in, not six years in, so it's hard to tell how much of it will stick or things of that nature. But I think we
can definitively say that the market is growing. Real traditional payments companies are entering the space. PayPal has always kind of been a bit of a leader here with the PYUSD issue in some of those things, but there's definitely now concrete examples that we can point to and say, really large enterprise, global money movement companies are doing things with stable coins, and that's amazing. That hasn't been true the past nine years.
Yeah, it's amazing. The race is on, Kevin, The race is very much on. And you know, you mentioned Western Union. They were like, hey, we're gonna lauch stable coin in Stillana and much more. It's pretty amazing. It's kind of surreal. You kind of have to pinch yourself because you know, just a few years back, you couldn't imagine that we were in such a different environment, Crypto being attacked and.
Much more Operation Chow point two point zero. Like even US as a company.
We're coming up on our second birthday, which is still very very young for US, and we were six months in and we were wondering, depending on how kind of political events go, do we move to London, do we geofence the US and start to focus on a payments network that doesn't touch anything to do with the US and is more focused on like Europe to Africa and
Asia and sort of those corridors. And then we've gotten the regulatory environment that we have now, and obviously we've you know, coalesced around New York and the US market is very much open, and you're seeing Stripe going on acquisitions, freeze of of not just Bridge but also Privy or saying fireblocks acquiring.
You're seeing kind of.
Innovation is very much alive in the US and the stable coin world.
Kevin, last time we spoke you highlighted the benchmark product that the folks at border is built. Are there any updates there?
You know, what are you seeing? So far?
We've been super proud of that product, and really that was driven by a lot of customer need that we were seeing in traditional PSPs and kind of enterprise FinTechs that were saying, hey, borderless, is it true that stable coins are better, faster, cheaper. And obviously in the traditional FIAT world you have Bloomberg mid Market, you have XC dot com, you have kind of all these incredibly neutral places where you can see what an indicative FX rate
looks like between FIAC currencies. You don't have that in stable coins before the borderless benchmark. Right, you can go to bitso and you can see their order book. You could go to open fx and see their order book. You can go to yellow Card and see their order book. But is yellow cards pricing for ZAR and USDT represent of the entire industries pricing?
Maybe? Maybe not?
And we realize, wait a minute, because we have built this entire payments network, now we can start to create all this value on top of that payment's network. And really the way that we think about our flywheel is that you have data these transactions the payments network. The transactions create more data, The data creates more insights. Insights drive better transactions, which create more data, which create more insights, which drive more transactions.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And what we said is, Okay, we're connected to over one hundred and fifty pricing feeds and we see all this transaction activity, and we see all the execution prices that are happening across the network. What if we aggregate that, anonymize it, and create the world's biggest data set of stable coin to Fiat actual FX prices around the world.
And we've visualized that in this benchmark. But this core data set now is about to cross a million data points of actual Fiat FX execution prices, rates, transactions, etc. And we are powering some very exciting research that is coming out about stable coin FX rates from some of the biggest brands in the world.
That's incredible. Congrats on that. And I remember when you were telling me about the tool. I'm like, this absolutely makes sense. You know, it's you have all this adoption, you have all the usage. Where's the data? How can we what can we extrapolate from the data and learn and our learnings and then that can inform business decisions and market decisions and much more. So. That's really great. Now, you're working with a plethora of different companies and brands.
Can you give an example, and I know you probably can't share too many details, but an example of a company you're working with that is using stable coins and they're doing something really cool.
Yeah.
Look, I love nothing more than highlighting our customers.
And we've been spending quite a bit of time working with a company called Bastion. Bastionian has an absolutely phenomenal team and they've put together a great product around stable
coin issuance. We're helping them with the Borderless network on global on and off ramps for their issuance, and together we're going to be powering Sony and Sony Banks products around the stable coin space, which is you know, a global fortune five hundred of epic proportions, and you know, the Bastion team's really been crushing it and we're just excited to get to be a part of that journey and to be part of kind of bringing one of
the world's largest electronics companies into the stable coin world. And it's really interesting to me, they're so big they own their own bank.
That's incredible, right, wow, And it's.
Really telling to me that they're bringing this product to market through the bank subsidiary. I think that gives you a lot of insight about where this roadmap is going and about the level of investment and the level of conviction that they have about stable coins to say, no, no, this isn't going to be some like fringe thing that's brought into the market by like PlayStation as like credits or something like that. It's the actual bank entity that's going to be bringing this product live.
And that's that's incredible.
I'm assuming they're going to use the stable coin infrastructure for both internal payments and mostly for sure external payments, right.
Without going into the things that that you know, we really shouldn't be going into. The roadmap is really exciting. The roadmap is really broad. There's going to be a lot more coming about kind of how Sony is going to be using stable coins.
I'm gonna let the Bastion team tell that story.
This is really, you know, their win, and we're we're excited to be supporting them on it. But this is from from where we sit and all the activity that we see happening twenty twenty six is going to be unreal, man, it really will be.
It's exciting as far as your roadmap, what can you tease or hint or give to us, you know, because you guys are always innovating and working on cool things.
We are, you know.
I was thinking about what opening remarks I want to give at the summit this afternoon, and one of the things I was thinking about is I got into stable coins helping launch True USD, which was the first USD based us you know, fully reserved stable coin, and then Circle quickly followed. And now, you know, I've done a lot of other firsts in the past decade, but most recently it's been launching Borderless, which is the first stable coin payments network in the world. And then six months
later Circle followed with CPN. So I don't know if Jeremy taps my phone or something, but like maybe I got to double check into that. But a lot of the way that we're now thinking about it is is connectivity as the foundation and as certainly the core of the product set. But now that we're getting all this data,
these transactions can feed insights. What are the sorts of guidance and what are the sorts of kind of advice and different value that we can build on top of this network where when customers think about borderless, it's no longer about oh, if I connect to three or four provid through borderless instead of connecting to them directly.
What features do I lose through borderless?
Now it flips and it says, wait a minute, if I don't connect through borderless, what borderless features do I lose by going directly to these underlying liquidity providers? And that's what our twenty twenty six roadmap is all focused about. The benchmark is a starting point things around back office automation, compliance automation, How do you handle RFI as at scale? What different sorts of agentic workflows can you put into those things? I'll tease the word agentic, maybe we'll leave
it there. There's a lot of really exciting stuff that we're excited to bring to market, and we're wildly confident that we are years ahead of where other people are thinking, and it's going to be really fun to see the reactions.
I'm excited to see those rollouts and I get a promise that you're going to come on and talk about it.
For those that don't know, our offices are like three blocks from each other. Yeah, so I promise you that I will come wander down anytime.
You'll have me awesome. Final question herefore, I let you gogus. I know you got to go take care of things. What do you think about these banks fighting stable couin yield and ongoing back and forth with legislation.
I think banks have two issues.
One is, historically they've been terrible sharers of yield.
Right.
That's kind of the opportunity that neobanks took early on. Why would you sign.
Up for a revolute or a chime or something like that.
It was the allure of high yield savings accounts, right. That was the initial value proposition where FinTechs came in and took a big chunk out of banks. The second thing to keep in mind is that with Genius Act, stable coins have to be fully reserved. But bank's business is fractional reserves. Bank's business is lending. So stable coins are kind of inherently under genius incompatible with the business
model of banks. And that's where obviously their spearheading tokenized deposits right and they're saying, we want to stay on a fractional reserve basis. If stable coins can pay yields, they become super attractive. If they can't pay yields, they're far less attractive to everybody, which gives them a better
chance of pushing tokenized deposits. Where I think this ultimately ends up is you have a lot of different types of banks as well, where you have like consumer focus banks, you have commercial banks, you have central banks, et cetera,
et cetera. I think we're going to have different types of products at those different levels, and I think commercial banks we should think of as tokenized deposits, and I think that's how they're going to interact with each other, and that's going to be how they settle.
That's the world they're going to live in.
And then when we get into more consumer centric banks and we get into moving money in and out of the system versus around the system, that's where stable coins will live. So tokenized deposits will form the inside of the system, and then stable coins will then form the perimeter of that system for making it interoperable with the rest of the world and the rest the blockchain ecosystem.
Sure I'm hoping they find some sort of compromise because I know they're holding up the market structure bill as a result. Yes, unfortunately, Yeah, but I think we will figure it out. And you know, like you were mentioning earlier, a lot of banks are working on their own stable coins. They are, and I'm hoping they can.
Look.
I think I believe in the free market, and I would love if my bank that I currently use offers a great stable coin you'll return.
That would be awesome, exactly, or stable coin based remittance.
Right.
We've seen Cross River do some full announcements there at the end of last year where they said, Hey, as a bank, we're going to support USDC as a rail you don't need to go to a middleman anymore. You don't know you need to go to an intermediary on and off ramp. The bank is the on and off ramp, and that's incredibly exciting. I think that's what we're going to see three four, five years from now, is you're going to have banks directly participating in the stable coin ecosystem.
Wow.
Amazing to hear banks mentioning or working with stable coins and crypto and so forth.
It's a brand new day. It's amazing. It is a brand new day.
Yeah, Kevin, I know you got to go, but thank you so much for taking the time. And we're going to talk again this year, so but.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Tony.
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