Over the past several episodes, we’ve been building a conversation about how stablecoins are reshaping the global payments landscape. We’ve spoken with infrastructure providers like Fireblocks about what the institutional plumbing looks like. We’ve talked with a Citi about how they’re thinking about tokenized deposits and digital asset capabilities. And in a recent episode with the CEO of MANSA, we dove deep into the liquidity problem: how four trillion dollars sits locked in prefunded correspondent accounts around the world, and how stablecoins are beginning to unlock that capital for businesses operating in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

That conversation surfaced something important: this isn’t just a technology story. It’s a story about access. And while MANSA showed us the liquidity layer, there’s another critical piece of the puzzle: the infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments actually work on the ground in emerging markets.

In this episode, Chris Maurice, the CEO and co-founder of Yellow Card, joins Drew Edmond to explore how stablecoins are transforming global payments, especially in emerging markets, by addressing liquidity issues, reducing costs, improving compliance transparency, and enabling faster cross-border transactions. Listen in as they highlight the challenges of legacy infrastructure, regulatory evolution, interoperability, and the evolving role of banks and technology platforms in this ecosystem.

 

 

 

Episode Transcript

Drew Edmond: Hello, I’m Drew Edmond, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire. Over the past several episodes, we’ve been building a conversation about how stablecoins are starting to reshape the global payments landscape.

We’ve spoken with infrastructure providers like Fireblocks about what the institutional plumbing looks like. We’ve talked with Citibank about how they’re thinking about tokenized deposits and digital asset capabilities, and in our recent episode with the CEO of MANSA, we dove deep into the liquidity problem, how $4 trillion sits locked in pre-funded correspondent accounts around the world, and how stablecoins are beginning to unlock that capital for businesses operating in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

That conversation surfaced something important. This isn’t just about technology. It’s a story about access, about who gets to use dollars efficiently and who doesn’t, about the gap between how the financial system was designed for developed markets and the reality of how money actually needs to move in places like Lagos, Nairobi, Manila, and Buenos Aires.

Today, we’re going deeper into that reality because while MANSA showed us the liquidity layer, there’s another critical piece of the puzzle, and that’s the infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments actually work on the ground in emerging markets. The on-ramps and the off-ramps, the compliance frameworks, the relationships with local regulators and currencies, the operational complexity of keeping the rails running in environments where banks go down, regulations shift, and where the correspondent banking system was never really built for you in the first place.

Consider this in parts of Africa. Transferring US dollars between two banks in the same country can cost 5% or more. Not because the technology doesn’t exist, but the plumbing just was never built for these markets. And for businesses trying to operate across-borders in the developing world, every hour of delay and every basis point of cost can be a major difference between growth and stagnation.

Joining me to dig into all of this is Chris Maurice, the CEO and Co-founder of Yellow Card. Yellow Card is the stablecoin payments infrastructure company that was built for emerging markets, enabling international payments, treasury management, and access to hard currency liquidity for institutions operating in some of the most complex financial environments.

Chris and his team operate across Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, in the Middle East serving major global payments networks, banks, and multinational corporations. And Chris has been at this longer than most. He started trading Bitcoin for cash in Alabama many years ago, years before any of this was becoming as mainstream as it is today.

And he has since built Yellow Card into one of the most recognized names in emerging markets stablecoin infrastructure. He’s spent years on the ground traveling across Africa, opening bank accounts, building relationships with regulators, and learning what it actually takes to make digital dollars work in places where the traditional system falls short.

Chris, welcome to Payments on Fire.

Chris Maurice: It’s good to be here, brother.

Drew Edmond: So Chris, before we get into it, I want to start with your story. You’ve built Yellow Card into a leading stablecoin infrastructure company in emerging markets. What drew you to the world of stablecoins and money movement?

Chris Maurice: Well, look, I met a Nigerian guy on the internet that told me to get into this business, which is how most companies start these days. So pretty normal from that standpoint. Long story short, my now co-founder Justin is the guy that used to walk around college parties evangelizing the gospel of Bitcoin. He’s about six seven, very sweaty. He’d have six people at a college party, arms spread wide, just sermon on the mount-ing Bitcoin. So that was back in, what, 2013, right?

So fully down the rabbit hole by 2015, realized this is the best thing ever, this is what I’m doing with my life. Tried a number of things in the States. What we landed on was we were going to put a gift card in CVS, Walmart, places like that. You’d walk in, buy this gift card, redeem it for Bitcoin.

We started building that out. While building that, one day, met this Nigerian man at a Wells Fargo in Auburn, Alabama, the capital of innovation.

Drew Edmond: Oh, so you weren’t joking. This wasn’t an email from a Nigerian prince asking you to transfer money. This was a real Nigerian person in the real world. Apologies. Continue.

Chris Maurice: Basically, yeah, met this guy at a Wells Fargo in Alabama. This Nigerian guy was sending 200 bucks to his family and the bank charged him $90 to send $200. And I thought, well, that’s insane, right? How could it possibly cost?

So, I talked to the guy, Hey, have you heard of Bitcoin? It’s free, it’s instant, it’s fun, all this great stuff. And I went home and I just started thinking, what’s this guy’s mom going to do with $200 in Bitcoin?

Drew Edmond: Yeah.

Chris Maurice: Like, you can’t buy food with that. You can’t pay rent with that. What problem is this solving? And I don’t think I knew where Nigeria was on a map at the time. They don’t teach you nearly as much about Africa as you might expect in the Louisiana education system. I know that might be hard for you to hear, Drew, but it is true.

Wanted to learn everything that I could, right? I started doing all this research, trying to understand the country and the currency and the continent and the banking system, and realized if I want to understand Nigeria, I need to speak to somebody from there. And so I put out an ad online that said, looking to speak to Nigerian men.

Drew Edmond: Okay.

Chris Maurice: Yeah, well look, Drew, let’s just say they didn’t want to talk about banking. Right.

It was a very popular one. I got a lot of responses, turns out, and yeah, ended up meeting this guy. This was the point of my life where I learned that Nigerians are the most convincing people on the face of this planet, because within about a month and a half of meeting this Nigerian man on the internet, he had convinced me to go get a passport and take the first international flight of my life, I had been on a plane four times in my life before starting the company, and landed in Lagos on a six day old passport, no visa, no shots, and a one-way ticket that we spent all of our money on.

So the options very literally were build something that works or live in Nigeria for the rest of life.

Drew Edmond: Yeah. Usually they don’t let you even take off without that return trip, but you made it happen.

Chris Maurice: why they let me talk them into it, but here we are.

Drew Edmond: So you’ve come from shopping Bitcoin to folks to now stablecoins. Of course, the value prop there is that, well, Bitcoin, as we are very well aware at this point, is highly volatile. Maybe not the greatest method of moving money for a variety of reasons.

Stablecoins have emerged, particularly over the past several years, and especially really had its kind of rising moment, I would say, in 2025, whether that’s the Bridge acquisition or the GENIUS Act, all these different attributes and elements that have contributed to its emergence.

You have a line that kind of struck me from last time we spoke that stablecoins are a new and improved dollar, that it’s a better version of something that people already want. Can you kind of unpack that idea a little bit? What does it mean on the ground, like you said, for somebody in Nigeria to use a stablecoin instead of a traditional dollar or a Bitcoin for payments?

Chris Maurice: Yeah, look, I think stablecoins are, I mean, stablecoins and AI are like the two hot things in tech right now that everybody’s talking about, right. It’s tough to go a week without hearing about stablecoins, AI especially when you run a stablecoin company.

That’s what a lot of the focus is on, and I think that the reason why stablecoins have become so popular is what they actually do for global payments in terms of the way that they interact with and replace the dollar, right? And so I think there’s a lot of companies now that are helping with payments in like the US and Europe, I don’t mean this in any disrespectful way, but in the US and Europe, you don’t have these problems generally, right? Because you live on the dollar, you have very easy access to the dollar, and so you don’t experience the dollar in the same way that most of the rest of the world experiences the dollar, right, where the dollar is a stable asset. It’s a scarce asset, it’s illiquid in a lot of countries, right? And it is critical for these economies, right? In Africa, Southeast Asia, some of these parts of the world you’re dealing with, in some cases, economies that are 80% import dependent, right?

So there’s a lot of dollars are needed to be able to fulfill demand for consumer goods, for food, for medicine, for so many different things. And the reality is, again, in the US and Europe, it’s a little different. But the reality is outside of the US and Europe, the dollar, the user experience of the dollar sucks. It’s not a good user experience at all. If the dollar were a startup, right, it would’ve went out a long time ago. Nobody would be funding it. But of course, it’s so embedded in the modern financial system that you can’t go without it.

And so when I talk about like stablecoins being a better form of the dollar, I think that it’s important for people to sort of remember and focus on what stablecoins are doing and what they’re not doing. We hear constantly about stablecoins in the context of like dollarization, right, and helping like with dollarization and this and that. We are not seeing that on the ground. I’m not going to say that that doesn’t happen anywhere in the world, but we don’t see that on the ground in the countries that we work in. What we do see is any country that uses the dollar in any unique way, which I mean, look, every country uses the dollar in some way, shape, or form. They are rapidly switching over to stablecoins and you’re not seeing additional use cases of the dollar, right? Like stablecoins are not coming in and like, oh, wow, all of a sudden I can buy bread with this. We’re not seeing that at all. If you need to make a local payment, there’s plenty of better ways to make a local payment than stablecoins, right.

Drew Edmond: Absolutely.

Chris Maurice: But for large international payments, for anything that involves the dollar. So in a lot of countries, that’s real estate, that is any cross-border payment, that is savings, that is anything like that that already was touching the dollar, we are seeing that move over to stablecoins.

So it’s not bringing new people into the ecosystem, it’s improving the way that the ecosystem already works.

Drew Edmond: Right. I guess the steelman for the dollarization argument was, or the concern probably around it was, Hey, all of a sudden all of these citizens of this particular country are going to swap out all of their local currency for essentially USD. And that’s going to restrict the ability of the central bank to manage their own currency and fluctuations and whatever monetary policies and fiscal policies they want to do as a result.

And you’re saying that’s not what’s happening because that’s not really the use case we’re solving for here. We’re not solving for domestic payments in Kenya. We can use our mobile phones and pay with M-PESA. When I go to the vendor down the street to buy my fruits and vegetables, we’re not seeing a stablecoin replacement for that today. We’re seeing it as maybe multinational corporations, we’re looking at enterprises buying from suppliers. They want to move money faster, they’re buying from China or something like that, and they want to put the funds, the value of their money movement in the hands of their supplier faster.

And this is a way to do that, that wasn’t previously available to them. Is that fair?

Chris Maurice: Exactly. That’s the key, right, is it is a better, faster form of the dollar. And anything that was previously happening on the dollar, now it’s happening on stablecoins. And so it’s, again, from an international payment standpoint, from a settlement standpoint, that’s what you’re seeing. To your example, right, of if you’re buying fruit from a vendor in Nairobi, it’ll be a cold day in hell before you’re whipping out your phone and asking for somebody’s 25 digit wallet address where if you get one letter wrong, your money is gone forever, right?  M-PESA works phenomenally, right? I’ve used  M-PESA a lot.  M-PESA is great if you’re in Kenya.

And so, you know, yeah. It doesn’t change the way that people interact with the dollar, right. It just improves the actual uses and sort of speed and functionality of the dollar. Look, for pretty much the last hundred years, when people lose faith in a local currency, they run to the dollar, of course. So is that going to continue to happen? Yes. To the extent that people lose faith in a local economy, they will go to the dollar the way that they always have, right? You’ve seen this even as recently as hyperinflation and like Venezuela and places like that. So that will always continue to be a thing, right?

Maybe they’ll use stablecoins, but it’s not, the technology by itself is not encouraging that behavior.

Drew Edmond: Sure. And one thing you’ve said before in one of our conversations was around comparing the stablecoin infrastructure in, let’s say, the US and Europe compared to the emerging markets where you focus most of your time, Africa, LATAM, Asia, Middle East, et cetera. And correct me if I’m articulating this incorrectly, but you kind of said it’s kind of more commoditized in those developed markets, right, and the emerging markets kind of live in a different world. Is it that the legacy traditional infrastructure in the emerging markets is the reason for that? Is it the actual stablecoin infrastructure that contributes to that? Help me understand kind of the differences between the emerging markets and the developed markets, if you will, from your perspective.

Chris Maurice: Yeah, the key thing is with the US and Europe, right, and any other sort of globally developed market, you have payment rails that work because they were designed to interact with each other. The US banking system was, in a sense, designed and Swift and all that was designed for US and Europe to be able to interact and move money between each other and speak the same language and all of that.

These systems were never built for Argentina. They were not built for Nigeria. They were not built for Laos and so many other parts of the world. Which is why, look, these countries are available on Swift, in theory, right? Number one, moving money out on Swift is generally extremely difficult because of liquidity challenges, right? Access to dollars, things like that through the banking system. And then moving money in on Swift is also extremely challenging. It takes days. There’s always some issue, right? For anybody that’s ever sent money to any emerging market, there’s always an issue. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it, it doesn’t matter. I mean, you can send the same payment every day for a year and there will still be a problem, right? Stablecoins are designed for those markets.

The analogy that I always like to use is in the US and Europe, you have essentially these super highways of money movement. And that’s what the banking system in the US and Europe provides, is a super highway for money movement. And you can go, fly down a hundred miles an hour down this interstate and it’s fine. And sure, I’m not going to say like the bank is the best, easiest way to send money to Europe, but it works at the end of the day.

Well, that interstate, to take that analogy a little bit further, the moment you need to interact with any of these emerging markets, you’re no longer on the Audubon right now, you’re taking an exit onto a dirt road with potholes everywhere and your car only has three tires, right? And you need to get to the other side.

It’s a significantly different system that you’re dealing with, which is why the adoption from a payments perspective, for this technology is taking place, in Africa, it’s taking place in South America, in Southeast Asia, in these parts of the world versus the US where, look, I mean it’s still largely used to trade dog and cat coin and need something in the middle to sit in.

Drew Edmond: Yep. So maybe we can dig in a little bit to where stablecoins aren’t the panacea that sometimes they’re portrayed to be to a certain extent. For example, right, I think one argument that people make from a cross-border money movement, kind of comparing correspondent banking, Swift, et cetera, to something like stablecoins is that at the end of the day, you can move the money, but you still have, if you’re going to follow the rules, you still have the compliance and the checks, sometimes the manual checks that need to occur, that happen at kind of that last mile anyways.

And so given kind of the growth in the speed at which Swift has made some innovations right, in terms of their ability to at least move the messaging faster, we know that’s not actually a settlement engine. But from a messaging standpoint, we’re getting the messaging to the banks faster, but they still have to go through that process. If you move stablecoins and you’re compliant, you’re still going to need to follow some rules there. So it’s not necessarily solving for everything.

So maybe just comment on how you view that argument in the light of what stablecoins do differently from using Swift. And obviously that’s going to differ by corridor.

Chris Maurice: I think the best summary is banks cannot replicate stablecoins. Their only option is to completely dig up their existing infrastructure and switch over to stablecoin and blockchain based infrastructure. Using blockchain, I can recreate a bank very easily. All I have to do is slow transactions down by three days and charge you $25 to make them, and now you have a bank on chain, right?

So it’s one of those inversions from a technology standpoint where, look, a hundred percent, like there’s still going to be compliance checks. There’s still going to be screenings and things like that. But you don’t need to wait three days for that money to land at the end of all of that. That’s the thing that I think people miss in that argument is, in fact, we’re able to do better screening through on chain, than we are through any bank.

Because if I’m sending money to Drew’s bank, especially if it’s overseas, if I’m sending money to your bank in, Singapore or Italy or wherever, I have the information that you’re giving me, and then I can deliver that money to that bank. For all I know you can turn around and wire that money to North Korea, right?

I would have no way of knowing that you’re doing that. I’m trusting that the bank is sort of watching out for that stuff, which, I mean, banks not the greatest track record of preventing that stuff, but-

Drew Edmond: We have some instances. We have some instances.

Chris Maurice: There have been some cases. And so you have no real way of knowing sort of who you’re dealing with other than the information that you’re collecting.

On chain, we can see everything. If I’m sending money to Drew’s wallet, well I can actually see Drew then sent that money to somebody that sent that money to somebody that sent that money to North Korea. And so I know, well Drew is actually only three hops away from a North Korean hacker wallet or something, right. Many examples of that.

You can see all of this stuff on chain, and you, as a financial institution, can set your own risk parameters, right? Maybe you’re okay if it’s seven hops away, but you’re not okay if it’s only two hops away, right? And you get to make that decision because you have all of the information at your fingertips, which is just not available through the banking system.

And so the thing is, stablecoins, it’s not just better from a settlement standpoint, but by nature, blockchain is open source and the information is available, so we have a lot more information available at our fingertips to be able to make determinations on a compliance, like from a compliance level and standpoint than we do with traditional fiat payments.

Traditional fiat payments, obviously you collect information and you know all of that to the best of your ability, but there’s still always that element of trust where like Drew can kind of do whatever he wants once I give him the money. It’s not the same with stablecoins. It’s not the same with blockchain.

And so not only is the settlement speed significantly faster and the finality is a hundred percent right once it’s delivered on chain, but that you also actually have better compliance tooling available to you on chain. So it’s like just every aspect of the flow is made significantly better by switching over to this technology.

Drew Edmond: Do you anticipate, I mean, Swift came out, I don’t know, a few months ago or whenever it was, and they said that they were looking into kind of bringing in stablecoin into their ecosystem. Do you see that to them as, obviously it’s a defensive maneuver, but also given the challenges that there are probably just in the Swift world and in the traditional correspondent banking world to reach the more challenging corridors, do you see that as them kind of starting there and then maybe expanding and replacing the traditional routes? Or the traditional routes for them, well established, those work well enough and we’re going to be okay with that. Or do you see stablecoin as taking over the world essentially, or does it remain in this challenging corridor world of, it’s really hard here, liquidity’s hard, the infrastructure’s hard. Like it’s going to be kind of this bifurcated environment.

Chris Maurice: In some countries they have already taken over the world, and they are going to continue to take over the world. Swift and organizations like that have an interesting decision to make over the subsequent months, years, et cetera. Again, going back to what I was saying, right, like I can recreate Swift very easily on chain. All I gotta do is charge you more money and slow the transactions down, right? That’s it.

Drew Edmond: Maybe add some more hops along the way.

Chris Maurice: Yeah, just like make it so that every payment goes through Drew before it goes anywhere else. And again, now you have Swift on chain. Not to use like an overused analogy, but it is a Kodak moment for a lot of these financial institutions. Do you upgrade to digital or do you become a relic of an old era and, look, the difference with financial transactions is you’re not going to have a bunch of hipsters in Brooklyn that one day decide that film is cool again.

Once we’re onto instant payments, nobody is going to be like, oh wow, I really miss when it took three days to send my grandmother money, right? You’re not going to have that.

Drew Edmond: I don’t know. I think I might open up a correspondent banking bar in Williamsburg, you know?

Chris Maurice: Exactly. Yeah. Who’s going to miss it? It’s a really interesting decision that some of these guys have to make. Swift is very well ingrained in the traditional banking system. And so I think the reality is that Swift has an opportunity, if they’re willing to cannibalize some of their existing business, they have an opportunity to work with the banks and sort of switch people over to these rails.

The companies that are really in a tight position right now are remittance companies, large B2B payments companies, any company that helps you send money from country A to Country B and takes a cut in the middle for doing so.

Drew Edmond: Mostly using kind of the pre-funding mechanism, right? And they’ve established all these partnerships around the globe to, but cost of capital, it’s how do you expand beyond that? It’s very expensive.

Chris Maurice: Let me take it a step further, right? ‘Because look, we talk to these guys all the time. These guys are large customers of ours. And so sometimes they get caught up in this idea, well, using stablecoins, you can fix the pre-funding issue, which is true a hundred percent. And that’s if you are running a remittance or like B2B payments company, and you’re still pre-funding, there’s a lot that can be done about that. We do that all the time for these companies, is help to eliminate that pre-funding.

The thing is though is that as you look out 5, 10 years in the future, stablecoins and blockchain technology as a whole, like at its core, like what I love about it and what I love about the core functionality of blockchain is it eliminates middlemen by design. So if you and I, Chris and Drew, need to do a transaction and there is any business entity, anything else in the middle of that transaction, well that’s no longer needed. You and I can just transact with each other.

And so I’ll give you a practical example, right? Because this is something that we work on with banks is, you look out 5, 10 years, every bank is going to have, so let’s say Drew has an account with a large Argentine bank. That account is going to have a wallet for USDT on every chain for USDC on every chain for PYUSD and ROUSD and every other stablecoin on every major chain that it supports, you’ll be able to receive money into those wallets. That’ll just be instantly converted to, in this case, peso and deposited into your account as peso. So any time that you receive USDT, USDC, anything else on chain, it’s just deposited into Drew’s account in peso.

Now, you take that out a little bit further. In the US you have 70 million people that use Coinbase. Coinbase offers free one-to-one on-ramping to USDC, which means in that world, if I have a Coinbase account, I can get USDC for free, move that money on base or any other low cost chain for essentially free, and that money just landed in peso in Drew’s account in Argentina without any remittance company, without any B2B payments company in the middle of that transaction.

How long does it take to adopt that? I mean, look, banks obviously are not known for being the fastest adopters of like new technology, but I think especially for receives as they get more comfortable from a compliance standpoint and all this, there’s going to be a major domino effect.

You’re going to have a couple of big banks that do it, right? A couple of big banks in the US will accept USDC deposits and USAT and whatever else soon, right? You already see this popping up, and then it’s just a domino effect. And now you can interact with anybody that uses any bank in the world on chain without ever having to actually work with a company to do that.

Drew Edmond: So a couple things popped into my mind, one being, we’ve talked about how kind of dollarization doesn’t seem to really be happening right now because people aren’t en masse holding onto stablecoins or converting all of their wealth into stablecoins.

In a world where the distribution of stablecoins becomes much easier, Coinbase has 70 million people in the US, we’ll talk maybe in a little bit about the news coming out that Meta’s thinking about bringing in stablecoins to their ecosystem, which for me makes me think most about WhatsApp, right? I mean, imagine an embedded crypto wallet within your WhatsApp account and what that means for everyone that’s using that communication channel to all of a sudden have that ability to easily move stablecoins instantly to anybody on their WhatsApp contact list.

So all of a sudden we have this massive distribution, massive kind of ecosystem where people around the world have the ability to do it than maybe they didn’t even know about it before. Now that dollarization conversation maybe starts to shift a little bit because I think, at the end of the day, you know when you’re talking about, oh, it’s USD, it’s free to free to convert from fiat to USDC. That’s great. Keep it on a low cost chain like Base. That’s great.

But then we’re off ramping into peso. How much are we going to have to pay for that off ramp fee? On the receive side, that’s where people start to say, well, you’re still paying FX, you’re still paying off-ramp fees. That’s where some of these costs get integrated. And that’s kind of happy path too. What if I’m sending USDC on a different, on this chain to and this person wants USDT on this chain and now we’ve got interoperability concerns and all those types of kind non happy path scenarios.

What are your thoughts on kind of the interoperability challenge and where does it sit today and what needs to be fixed? And two, does the dollarization conversation shift. If there’s kind of a mass, well hypothetically, if a mass explosion in consumers starting to use USD pegged stablecoins on WhatsApp, and I guess that’s an assumption that it would all be USD pegged. But, yeah. What are your thoughts on just those concepts?

Chris Maurice: Interoperability is certainly a challenge today. It is one of those things that I think will be easily solved and specifically, and this is where I disagree with some of the industry, I actually think that it’s going to be a large bank that solves it. that a JPMorgan, a Citibank, et cetera. These guys will get comfortable with probably USDC first and then USAT and some of these other like GENIUS compliant stablecoins, and they’ll start accepting deposits for them, right, and holding reserves.

And when JPMorgan starts holding the reserves for stablecoins, well, everybody’s going to want their stablecoin backed by JPMorgan. Do you want the money backing your stablecoin in First Republic Bank of Chris and Drew? Or do you want your money held by the bank that literally can’t fail even in theory. So obviously people are going to spring for, well, it’s actually much safer to use a stablecoin that JPMorgan is holding the backing for. And I assume that’s part of their strategy with like JPMD and everything as well. If they start to say that for, hey, for GENIUS compliant stablecoins, you can open an account with JPMorgan, right, or Citi or any of these guys, and that becomes sort of the standard. Then any stablecoin that’s like sort of worth its salt, right, is going to end up moving a lot of its reserves to one of these major banks.

And at that point, if you have a hundred stablecoins, but JPMorgan is holding most of the liquidity for these a hundred stablecoins, JPMorgan is in a position now to build interoperability and to make sure that Amazon coin and WhatsApp coin are fully interoperable because the money’s all sitting in JPMorgan either way. That’s probably the most likely situation because I think a bank also, like with interoperability there involves like the movement of the actual dollars and things like that, which takes time, so you have to float it.

A bank is obviously in the best position to do that from a capitalization standpoint, et cetera, et cetera. The bottom line is you’re going to end up with a clearing house for stablecoins. And I think a large bank is in a position to be able to do that from an interop standpoint.

With WhatsApp and what you’re saying, look, a hundred percent. I mean, if all of a sudden I can text you money on WhatsApp, well, great. Like that eliminates the need for like half of the apps on my phone.

Drew Edmond: Yeah.

Chris Maurice: That solves a lot of my problems. To take that a step further, what do we think happens to middlemen, like Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, et cetera, when iMessage does the same thing for the US?

Well, now all of a sudden, look, I’m not an Apple guy, right? But, for the average person in the US, right, they’re using an Apple phone. Well, great. Now I can text my mom money on iMessage instantly. Great. Like, I don’t need any of these other apps anymore. This is all super easy and it’s on the platform that you’re already communicating on, right? So I think like you’re going to see a lot of these innovations over the next like 10 years.

Another big one that I’m very excited about is imagine, right now, like you have your Google Wallet, your Apple Wallet, et cetera. Well, imagine one of the cards is just a stablecoin wallet. So now, tap to pay anywhere and maybe it still runs through Visa and MasterCard rails, right. Eventually, like Google and Apple have a lot of power, right? And so, eventually Google and Apple have the ability to go even further upstream and just say, hey, you know, when you tap, it’s actually, you’re just interacting with Google. You’re just interacting with Apple and we’re sending stablecoins and settling that instantly.

There’s a lot of really unique things that I think you’re going to see in product innovations that you’re going to see over the next several years in this space that are going to really blow out adoption.

Drew Edmond: Yeah. One thing I want to touch on, going back to kind of the financial institution element of this, is the concept of tokenized deposits. When we had Citi on a month or so ago, it was a main kind of topic of discussion. There’s been another kind of the report that came out from the Fed talking about just the difference on how financial institutions are thinking about tokenized deposits versus stablecoins. With the main difference, of course, being that a tokenized deposit is an actual deposit at the bank that they can lend on versus holding stablecoins, which they cannot lend on. I know there’s conversations happening at the political level to discuss kind of the implications of that and should that change over time.

How do you see, from where you stand today and the conversations that you have with financial institutions, are they leaning x deposit is it a world where you just end up having both and they kind of serve different purposes?

Chris Maurice: That’s a great question for the Fed. I don’t know if I can question. I think it’s been very different for the past year now under like the Trump administration versus sort of like the Biden administration.

But if you look back, I think it was in ’22, what was the bank in Wyoming or Montana? Custodia, I think, was the bank. Where basically their whole thing was they were going for like a Fed charter and they were going to be a 100% reserve backed bank. So no fractional lending, no fractional deposits, none of that, right. A hundred percent backed. And they got shuttered, right? They were not able to get a charter. And if I’m completely murdering the story, then you know, please-

Drew Edmond: I think that’s relatively close.

Chris Maurice: -fix it in post. Yeah, these guys. The government has sort of protected the fractional reserve system before and it’s a big question with stablecoins because the thing is, if I can hold my money in an asset where all of that money is just sitting in US government debt, which again cannot fail, then why would I put my money down the street? Like maybe I’m still willing to put my money with JPMorgan, which can also not fail, but am I still willing to put my money down the street at like Community Bank, A, B, C?

Drew Edmond: I guess I just wonder if it turns into this thing where, let’s say I deposit, and that’s probably the wrong term to use at this point, but deposit stablecoins at JPMorgan. Could they just convert it to a tokenized deposit while they hold it, lend it, and if I need to send it somewhere, then reconvert it to stablecoins?

I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the inner workings of banking to know that answer.

Chris Maurice: Yeah. Basically the point that I was getting to is I think like all of that is true and I understand why there’s a debate over it because there is a legitimate question of like, well, do I want a hundred percent reserve or 10% reserve, right?

The thing is, I do think that in practice a lot of this is overblown. And the reason that I say that is, I don’t think the average person actually wants to self custody any of this stuff. And look, if you are self custodying stablecoins and holding them, then sure, now you have access to something outside of the banking system where you are a hundred percent backed by government debt.

If you are a normal person that does not self custody, because, look, normal people are not going to self custody. Dude, you gotta be in the space to self custody. You gotta be a, like a proper crypto guy to want to self custody, right? It is scary, right? Like as somebody that does it and has done it, like it’s scary. And everybody that has done it for a long time, especially if you were in the industry early, has a horror story or something of losing keys or losing money or this or that. Man, I got Ethereum stuck on a hard drive that I’m never going to be able to get off. All of this stuff, right?

I don’t think the average person will ever want to deal with that, and I don’t think that this is something that’s going to change generationally. I think that people will generally trust at least major banks more than they will trust themselves when it comes to keeping their assets safe. I generally trust JPMorgan with my money more than I probably trust myself to not like screw it up.

And so, I think that it’s a bit overblown in that the consumer behavior that they should be focused on is like, Hey, do you actually want to self custody? Because it’s not easy. Why don’t you keep your money with the bank? Maybe you keep it in stablecoins at the bank. But to your point, like once you do that, the bank can do whatever it wants, right? It can lend out the stablecoins, it can do this, do that. So there, there are a number of options there.

Drew Edmond: Got it. Maybe just circling back a little bit to the emerging market world, just given the regulatory impact that it has on this space. Of course, GENIUS Act was huge in the US last year for what it did for the industry. With your business, each country, of course, has their own regulators, their own central banks, their own governments with their own objectives and ideas of what they want to do from a monetary perspective and what they want to allow and disallow. That seems to have kind of been evolving over time.

I’d love to hear your perspective on what you’ve seen in the markets, how governments and regulators have maybe evolved their perspective on how they think about stablecoins.

Chris Maurice: We have seen a massive sea change over the last three years, and it has gotten so much better and just progressively better and better over the last three years. Really markedly so. And especially in emerging markets, right? Look, obviously from a developed market standpoint, Europe, wouldn’t recommend it for anything innovative generally. They love to regulate, US obviously very different now than it was, just going back a year or two, right.

And markets are taking note of these changes in the US and they are adapting accordingly. From an emerging market standpoint, what I always love to tell people is going back before, like the past year or so in the US, there was no better place to be running a company in stablecoins than in like Africa, than in Latin America, than in some of these emerging markets where you had more clarity than you did in the US at the time. You had more clarity than you did in like Europe at the time, and you had regulators that were willing to work with you.

Unless you’re Google, it’s very hard to actually get an audience with US regulators to really go into this stuff in these emerging markets. In general, these regulators will work with you, right? It is possible to seek guidance. It is possible to opine on like how this industry needs to develop over time.

And that’s what we’ve focused on, right, is from the beginning we wanted to be the company that would come in and help shape the way that this industry looks moving forward. And that’s always been very important to us, is making sure that we can have an impact on the future of this industry.

And we’ve done that from the beginning. And so we’ve spent, what, 7 years, and COVID counts as 12 years so that makes it almost 19 years, working with these regulators in all of these markets to develop licensing regimes, right, to develop, what does a regulatory regime look like for stablecoins that accounts for the ways that they’re used? Because I think a lot of the problems that you run into even now in Europe, where they love to regulate everything. MiCA doesn’t account for payments. It doesn’t. You need a separate license to make payments on stablecoins.

This is one technology. It needs to be regulated as one technology, and you need to account for the different use cases. And so we’ve been able to do that. We’ve been able to go country by country, work with these regulators and set that up. And I’m really proud of a lot of the work that the team has done to leave some of these parts of the world in such a great and innovative space for the industry.

Drew Edmond: That’s great. Chris, I want to say this has been a great conversation. I appreciate your candidness on all these questions. So thanks for joining me on this episode.

Chris Maurice: Of course, brother. Look, I don’t have any hobbies. I got nothing else to do. So if you ever need a backup guest, baby, I’m here. go, let’s go You call me.

Drew Edmond: Alright. Well, to all of you listening, thanks for joining us and until next time, keep up the good work. Bye for now.