Our first Payments on Fire episode aired in September 2014. The topic was Bitcoin. Over the past eleven years, we have discussed cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies – covering their potential, their adoption, and the technology that powers them.

For stablecoins, we have seen stakeholders across the payments value chain embracing crypto and stablecoins. Corporations like Visa and PayPal, and financial institutions like Citi, are discussing stablecoins in their annual reports.

The fact is that today trillions of dollars move through these systems every year, but if you stop someone on the street and ask what a cryptocurrency or stablecoin actually is, you’re likely to get a blank stare.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan welcomes back Ran ‘Goldi’ Goldstein, Senior VP of Payments and Networks at Fireblocks, to provide his perspective on the evolution of the digital currency space.

Tune in as they break down a stablecoin transaction, discuss the current state and adoption of blockchain technology, and review various use cases for stablecoins. They define terms like TradFi, Defi, and smart contracts, and explore the impact of tokenized deposits and AI on the digital currency landscape.

 

 

 

Yvette Bohanan: Hello, I’m Yvette Bohanan, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire.

Our first Payments on Fire episode aired in September of 2014. The topic was Bitcoin. Over the past 11 years, we have discussed cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies covering their potential, their adoption, and the technology that powers them. It’s been a fascinating evolution. A lot slower than many crypto enthusiasts had hoped for, and simultaneously slow enough that pundits still find it difficult to believe this will ever truly take root.

In the Andreesen Horowitz State of Crypto 2025 report, they noted that blockchains now process over 3,400 transactions per second, over $175 billion sits in Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange traded funds, and stablecoins power $46 trillion in annual transactions. Even if you remove bot activity, there is still $9 trillion of organic activity on these chains.

For crypto, the fastest on-chain growth is found in developing countries. For stablecoins, we have seen stakeholders across the payments value chain embracing crypto and stablecoins. Corporations like Visa and PayPal, and financial institutions like Citi, are discussing stablecoins in their annual reports. The fact is that today, trillions of dollars move through these systems every year, but if you stop someone on the street and ask what a cryptocurrency or stablecoin actually is, you’re likely to get a blank stare.

On episodes 148 and 162, we had the pleasure of discussing digital currency developments with Ran Goldstein or Goldi, as many people know him. The last time Goldi joined us on payments on fire in 2022, he was the CEO of First Digital Assets Group where he focused on the payment acceptance for stablecoins and CBDCs.

When we finished recording that episode, he told me to stay tuned because something exciting was brewing. And later that year, First was acquired by Fireblocks, a cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure provider focused on building an enterprise grade platform for financial institutions dealing with digital assets.

Goldi is currently the Senior Vice President of Payments and Networks at Fire Blocks. Goldi, I am delighted we’re catching up today because you have a historical perspective and unique current bird’s eye view on what’s happening in this space, and a fantastic way of authentically cutting through the hype without losing hope.

So welcome back to Payments on Fire.

Ran Goldi: Thank you for having me for the third time. As you said, Yvette, I’ve, I’ve been doing this for almost a decade waiting for this year. And yes, this year is also a lot of hype. If you go on LinkedIn, you can think stablecoins are solving world hunger, which they’re not. But the industry has changed over the past decade. And I think what’s happening right now is this moment in time where regulation’s at the right place. Big incumbents are at the right place of adopting this and there’s real usage and it’s exciting. Love to talk about it. Thank you for having me.

Yvette Bohanan: There’s a lot to talk about and you were telling me, it’s so busy. You’ve been traveling how many days out of?

Ran Goldi: So far it’s been 110 days. Hopefully the year’s almost done. I know of two more weeks, but that’s it.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. And then it’s just going to keep going actually. I’m sure of it. I wanted to start, because you’ve been at this a long time, we’ve been talking about this off and on for ages. Our first podcast was on Bitcoin, right? So this has been around, but a lot of people, this is still super new. And I’m going to start by just asking to sort of level set on a few key terms and where we are today with these definitionally and how it’s working.

Because the paradox is, on one hand you’ll read there’s trillions of dollars going through these systems right now. About 6, 7 trillion of that is organic, that you could apply to use cases instead of bots. But at the same time, if you go and I ask my husband or my neighbor, explain a cryptocurrency or explain a stablecoin, they’d look at you and go, I don’t understand, I don’t know. 99% of the people out there, right?

So can we start with just some decoding the basics together?

Ran Goldi: Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do it.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay. So we’re going to start by just following a dollar through its incarnation or reincarnation. I don’t know what it would be exactly, but it’s minted, right? It’s burned. It lives through wallets governed by these things called smart contracts. It travels through DeFi rails, all this good stuff.

Let’s walk through the lifecycle. So if I send you $100 digitally through a stablecoin, what is happening under the hood? Step by step.

Ran Goldi: Okay. It’s a great question. Because as you said, a lot of people just talk about it maybe without actually understanding what’s happening. So let’s say I am, I don’t know, I’m an individual or a company and I want to start sending people stablecoins, right? Because maybe I’m a company and one of my vendors asked me to pay in a stablecoin because they are somewhere else in the world, maybe in Singapore, where, by the way, there’s already four or five banks that are holding stablecoin accounts for businesses.

And he asked me to pay, let’s say, $10,000 in stablecoin. So what do I do? So I probably want to go, I want to buy that stablecoin somehow. That’s how you do it. You actually need to convert dollars to stablecoin. So you probably go to either an issuer or an exchange. Let’s say I go to Circle, that’s like the plain vanilla example in our world now, a public company, worth about $40 billion, the issuer of USDC, one of the first stablecoins out there.

They open an account, they do KYB on me, KYC, whatever type of client I am, and then I can send them to a bank account. $10,000. I will send those $10,000 and as they hit Circle’s account under my name, that reference for me, basically what will happen is they’ll take those $10,000 and they will hold that in their reserve. That reserve is held either in short term treasury bills, other type of instruments that either could be cashed out immediately, or just plain cash. And that’s fully transparent and public.

And once they put that in the reserve, they do this process called minting, which is basically that somewhere there’s a code that says, Okay, here are $10,000 now in our reserve. Please give this entity, person, company, whatnot, please grant their wallet address with 10,000 USDC, the equal, the equivalent of the $10,000 they’re deposited in 10,000 USDC tokens, right?

Those tokens now basically live in my wallet on the blockchain, right? So what does that mean? I guess we need decode that just really for a quick second. The blockchain is basically, you can think of it as a ledger, a database, but that database is global and database is held not by one entity, but a lot of entities.

And when I create a wallet for myself on the blockchain, what it basically means is there is a space on the blockchain that only I can access in terms of sending money from it to somewhere else. That’s it. Only I can do that with whatever is held in that space, on that database that is distributed.

Yvette Bohanan: I’m going to stop you just for a second. So is the Circle ledger something that everyone can see?

Ran Goldi: So when you deposit those $10,000 and they go in the reserve, that’s an internal ledger they hold on the who deposited what fiat dollars, as we call them, fiat into their account. Great. But when they mint you with 10,000 USDC tokens and put them in your wallet, that is for everyone to see. Everyone can see that. That is transparent.

Yvette Bohanan: So I could go in and just see that your company put. $10,000 into Circle USDC.

Ran Goldi: So that’s a great question because the addresses on the blockchain are not named, right. There’s no, here’s Goldi, here’s Yvette, here’s, I don’t know, JPMorgan. Addresses are just strings of numbers and theoretically only you know your wallet address.

So yes, if I put my wallet address on a billboard in San Francisco, like 32 characters, and someone can go and then look at that and they will know that’s Goldi’s address. But if I haven’t done that, then probably no one will know that’s me.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. So it’s transparent, but it’s not disclosed in a sense.

Ran Goldi: Exactly.

Yvette Bohanan: All right. And so now you’ve gone, so everything up to the minting step where they put that value and tokens onto their chain. The US, the Circle blockchain ledger was all done in fiat in like probably ACH kind of transactions. Two worlds going on here.

And is this on-ramping? Is this when like you’ve now on-ramped money? Is that the term?

Ran Goldi: Yeah, so that’s what we call on-ramp or off-ramp, right? So on-ramp is taking fiat dollars and basically receiving a digital asset instead of that. And off-ramping is the opposite. Giving some entity, an OTC desk, a crypto asset, a digital asset, and receiving fiat.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay, but you still haven’t paid your supplier in Singapore. You’ve just, all we’ve done so far is get something into a chain. Okay.

Ran Goldi: Exactly. So again, I wake up in the morning and this company, I already have an account, I send Circle $10,000. They tell me, There we go, we’ve put 10,000 USDC in your wallet. I control that wallet. Perfect. I call my vendor in Singapore and I ask them, Please send me the address where you want to receive this USDC.

They give me a different blockchain address than what I have, obviously. I put that in, I go into, let’s say, Fireblocks wallet, or the Circle platform. I click on transfer. I put their address, which again, to put this in normal terms, it’s like they gave me a bank account address, a Swift address, right, but this time it’s a blockchain address. It’s a different ledger, which by the way, this is what people need to understand. Blockchain is just another payment rail, right? It’s another type of ledger.

Basically, they gave me that address. I click send. I need to sign that transaction. Again, that is you, let’s say the equivalent of approving a bank transaction in with 2FA or other types of factors. So I need to sign that transaction.

It will go on the blockchain, probably will take about 0.1 to maybe 10 seconds at worst. And after that period of time, my vendor will then see that in their wallet. And boom, $10,000 are now overseas.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay, so this is where we stand at the whiteboard and we explain a bunch of stuff on one side and we explain a bunch of stuff on the other, and then there’s a box in the middle and it says, A miracle occurs. So let’s unpack the box in the middle because this is the part I think that gets really interesting.

That entity in Singapore doesn’t necessarily have access to or want USDC, right?

Ran Goldi: Correct. Maybe they just want Sing dollars, right?

Yvette Bohanan: They want Sing dollars. So what’s going on? How many steps are there in that zero point one to 10 second range that have just happened in that box?

Ran Goldi: So when I created a transaction and moved $10,000 from my wallet to their wallet, basically what happened is I created a transaction on a blockchain. There are multiple, let’s call that nodes, that needs to verify that’s a true transaction. That’s a mathematical process of cryptography. Once that’s verified, the transaction is confirmed and the balance will show on my vendor’s wallet.

Then, if they want to actually receive Sing dollars, they need to go through what you just called three minutes ago, off-ramping, right. So let’s assume that they received those 10,000 USDC into one of the five banks in Singapore that now supports stablecoin accounts. That bank will basically show you on their portal that you now have 10,000 USDC, and they will show you that same as any other FX you have, right? Euros, dollars, USDC, right? And then basically, if you’re in that bank, you’ll just hit convert.

And behind the scenes the bank will do the FX for you. They will probably go to a liquidity provider. They will give that liquidity provider 10,000 USDC. They will get $10,000 for real. And then that liquidity provider will do whatever they need to either reconcile with Circle, maybe they are doing other types of liquidity in and out in the region. But basically the bank will then give you the equivalent of $10,000 in SGD.

And that also happens when you go to an exchange. When you go to an exchange in Singapore, for example, a crypto exchange, and you tell them, here’s 10,000 USDC. Convert that for me to 10,000 SGD and send it to me, to my bank account in Singapore, right, what they will do is pretty much the same. They probably also have a Circle account and they will net that at the end of the day or at the end of the month and will have to transfer Circle dollars or receive dollars from them.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay, so anyone who’s doing an exchange is kind of relying on an ability to get to other forms of stablecoin and, to some degree, other forms of fiat currency.

Ran Goldi: Yeah, and I think this is really something that not a lot of people appreciate or maybe some misconception about stablecoins, right? Stablecoins are great if we want to do cross-border transfers. The importer exporter use case is probably the number one use case out there right now that moves hundreds of billions of dollars really right now, yearly.

But the thing is that it’s a great use case, not because stablecoin transfers are cheaper. They are not cheaper. When you need to move a stablecoin to probably a cross-border transfer that requires an FX anyways, you are not really saving on anything. So your dollars, yes, will be converted to USDC, but then as they move to Singapore, there will be FX somewhere. It’s not going to be cheaper than Swift.

But that said, it will be way faster. And if you can find economic value in that speed, then that is the real value that stablecoins will give you as a rail. So for example, in the importer exporter use case, the fact that someone can pay their exporter on a container that just hit the port and they don’t need to wait two more days, that’s two days of storing that container in port that costs $25-50,000, whatever. So they might have saved $50,000, but not on the transfer, but the economic value that the velocity of money created for them.

Yvette Bohanan: Bingo. Thank you. When do we burn this stuff on the chain?

Ran Goldi: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: Let’s finish the dissolution of this thing and then we’re going to come back to the time value of money.

Ran Goldi: So let’s say I got paid in USDC and I’m in the US. I will probably go to Coinbase or Circle. I will send them that USDC. I will hit burn and I will tell them, Please, when you burn this money, send it to this address, bank account address. And what will happen is once I click that, automatically, I’ll get a transfer receipt and that says, Okay, it has been burned, it’s been moved to your account. Expect ACH, wire, FedNow, whatever. And that’s it.

Yvette Bohanan: So the other point of confusion I think right now is cryptocurrency, stablecoins, CBDC. Okay. We know they all have value for different reasons. Either supply and demand, backed by fiat, or whatever. There’s another term that’s come up a lot lately is tokenized deposits. Can we add that to the mix and explain what a tokenized deposit is real quick? Because we’ll get into this in a bit and I want to make sure people understand what it is.

Ran Goldi: So I totally get why the two terms are very confusing because essentially they feel like the same thing. You are giving someone fiat money dollars and you are getting a virtual representation of that dollar. So in that sense, yes, stablecoins and tokenized deposit are pretty much the same.

But they’re very much different because where they defer is actually, what is the issuer type, what is the risk of you holding that token, and what’s being done with the reserves? So under different frameworks, Genius Act, whatnot, a stablecoin can be issued by a private company. If Glenbrook wants to issue a Glenbrook stablecoin, they can very much do that.

But there are now frameworks that says that, every dollar you receive that you are now minting and turning into a virtual dollar, you need to hold one for one in a reserve. And there are strict rules on how to do it and when transparency is needed. And also you are not, by the way, insured by FDIC or any other deposit insurer because it’s not a deposit. This is you converting one asset to a different asset. That’s it

Yvette Bohanan: We don’t insure it when you buy a bond or whatever. Yeah. That kind thing.

Ran Goldi: Exactly. Exactly. It’s the same money you had before. There’s nothing to insure in a way. But when you go to someone who’s creating a tokenized deposit, and that can only be performed by a regulated entity that’s probably most likely a bank, then what you’re basically doing is, you’re depositing money as you’ve always done.

The bank can do what they’ve always done, which is do fractional banking, right? Which is rehypothecate those funds and maybe give those out to someone as a loan. They will issue a one-to-one representation of that money in a virtual form, but they are not obligated to hold it in one-to-one reserve. It is just a deposit that you can now use digitally.

Now, what does that mean for you versus a deposit that you couldn’t maybe? It means that right now, probably through their banking system, you can now move that money 24/7, which maybe you couldn’t have done before because now they support a digital way of showing you your money. And again, it is FDIC insured. It’s a deposit in a bank. But it’s not a stablecoin. It’s not held one for one.

Yvette Bohanan: Interesting. And so this, this is sort of what’s unlocking at its core a lot of the innovation and a lot of the interest that is keeping you on the road. A hundred and some odd days this year, right?

Ran Goldi: Yeah, because stablecoins have, there’s been probably like three different events that’s created this. One was last year when Stripe bought a company called Bridge for $1.1 billion. No one saw that coming. Stripe tripling down on this field on stablecoins, right? The second big event was obviously an administration change in the US with the obvious sentiment that changed around that as well. And I think the third one recently is legislation, Genius framework, et cetera.

Now what happened is really interesting, Yvette, because stablecoins were leading the, I guess, conversation, but it’s very clear now that banks have joined the conversation in the last six months, by the way, like banks in the US, banks in Europe, globally, really that stablecoins will most probably will be replaced by some form of a tokenized deposit for some use cases. So I’m not telling you any secrets when I’ll say, banks do not want to hold your money one-to-one reserved. They are not on the stablecoin camp. That is not their business model.

Yvette Bohanan: Right. Yeah.

Ran Goldi: Yeah. That’s not how they make money. And some of us might argue that we want the banks to make money. So stablecoins are not going to fit. So the banks eventually, I suspect, will go on to the tokenized deposit route. They will probably push the regulators to have that technology probably more opened. And hopefully they will also be interoperable with one another because none of us wants to have a tokenized deposit per bank with weird conversions somewhere.

So I think that is where we’re going. I think this year has only been, we’ve definitely crossed the chasm. We’ve leapfrogged across the chasm this year in terms of where this industry is at. But it’s really just like another baby step.

Yvette Bohanan: You’re kind of at a really interesting juncture with what, maybe we should take a step back. For 30 seconds, can you explain what Fireblocks does? Because I keep seeing you everywhere, but you’re not necessarily that household name right now. Someday you will be, I’m sure, and you are in certain circles, but can you explain your current vantage point before I get into the next question? Just so people understand.

Ran Goldi: So real quickly, Fireblocks is the company that’s under the hood, 70% of institutions that are doing anything in digital assets. We basically have this infrastructure that allows you, if you want to build a payments company that accesses the blockchain, or want to tokenize an asset, or you want to create wallets for your users.

Again, if you are a new bank, or Robinhood, or Visa, or Stripe, or anyone in this space that wants to build large, scalable apps on blockchains, then you probably want to come to Fireblocks to help you create that infrastructure, that wallet structure.

And we are basically, I guess, reinvented security in this space in the last eight years. And we were very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. So then now we power 2,600 institutions and this year we will probably process anywhere between $5 to $6 trillion on behalf of those institutions. Whether those are traders, exchanges, payment companies, token issuers, and whatnot.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s a lot. That’s the GDP of Japan essentially.

Ran Goldi: Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: This isn’t like small potatoes, right? So, but it’s still like the tip of the iceberg of like all of commerce, right? So we’re just here at the very beginning in this threshold. So you have this really interesting perspective. You have all these. Companies, financial institutions coming to you with all these use cases and questions right now.

So the other confusing thing though for people is this notion about volume and traffic that you’re seeing. And so with this bird’s eye view, there’s what I would call like organic traffic, like people actually doing stuff, two counterparties kind of interacting, like the example we were walking through about paying your vendor in Singapore or sending money overseas or whatever. There’s also this notion of like, there’s just like these bots doing things, what are the bots doing and how do you discern what’s going on here with volume?

Because when you add in the bot volume, it gets very large and so what’s happening actually. Right now in, in terms of traffic and volume on the rails.

Ran Goldi: Okay. It’s an interesting question because first of all, let’s talk about where bots fit in here, right? Most of the time where people say bots in crypto, they usually mean crypto trading. And there’s a lot of those, as you say. There’s a lot of bot activity that’s happening on exchanges that’s trying to capture some sort of an edge in trading because, I’ll say this, I think it’s a known fact that trading on cryptocurrencies is still not as, I guess, perfected as trading on equities and stocks and futures globally.

Obviously the volume is not as big and as such, there’s a lot of exchanges, a lot of arbitrage to be made. And you do see a lot of bot activity there. What we are seeing when I talk about $5, $6 trillion that will go through Fireblocks this year, I’m talking about the whole volume of exchanges that uses us, custodians, fintechs again, and payment companies, and whatnot.

If I want to be more specific about this volume, and I think this is really what it gets interesting, by the way, is that half of that volume, a bit more than half, 56% is going to be stablecoins. So let’s say about $2.5 to $3 trillion are stablecoins. When we looked deeper into that volume, almost half of it was trading. This was either real traders or bots, whatever, doing trades that, someone bought Bitcoin, then they wanted out of the trade, they swapped it to a stablecoin, right, to keep the profit.

But half of it was payments, right. That has been motivated by 300 payment companies that run on Fireblocks. Now if we zoom in on that usage, that’s where it gets super interesting, about 40% of that is B2B payments, 15% of that is payment acceptance and pay ins, about 25% is payouts, so disbursements, and the rest is remittance and a bit of other stuff. Super interesting.

Yvette Bohanan: It is super interesting because it, that last bit that you just described gets to motivation of why companies are investing in this. Like why are they knocking on your door or whoever’s door to say, how do I do this?

So they’re convinced that they should do it, is what it sounds like. They’re not asking why should I do it, but they’re asking how do I do it? And they’re coming to you with specific problem statements in that regard. So what are the top problem statements you’re helping people solve for there in that sub sub-segmentation that you just went through?

Ran Goldi: I think in payments, it’s almost always not about the end user or the retail client. Sometimes it is, but it’s mostly actually a lot of very interesting B2B activity. So again, the importer exporter is one thing that’s happening in the billions, hundreds of billions. And the other interesting activity, for example, is remittance, funding between remittance companies, right?

So one of the case studies that we made public is when you send some sort of remittance through one of PayPal services, Xoom in the US, and you send it to someone in the Philippines, it’s actually a company called Cebuana that’s in the Philippines. They control 40% of the cash market. They have 3,500 locations over 6,000 islands in the Philippines. Something crazy. So if you send money from MoneyGram or Western Union or PayPal services to the Philippines, there’s like a very high chance that the person in Philippines will walk into a Cebuana location and get physical cash, Philippine peso, from that location.

Now, PayPal, they need to fund Cebuana in the Philippines, right? So they will fund them every four days. They will send enough money for four days, right? And then they will fund them again. Now, that obviously is not efficient. They do this because of Swift because it takes Cebuana four days to get that money, right? Everyone that is more than two corresponding bank banks away is due to get their money, unfortunately, not immediately, and basically they’re losing on the interest they could make on that money.

Now with PYUSD, which is a stablecoin that PayPal created, by the way, as an issuer, they fund them every 24 hours, which means that they can fund them on a weekend. They can fund them and keep the rest of the three days they used to send their way still in their account, making interest or doing whatever they want to do with their money.

Yvette Bohanan: This is great. So it gets back to that cargo ship example, the cargo ship here is actually the money going into Cebuana. And of course Xoom is like global, so they’re doing this all over the place, right. So this is a huge deal.

When the announcement came out that PayPal was issuing their own stablecoin, it was sort of this scoff, like who’s going to use the PayPal stablecoin? And you just explained like why PayPal cares about this. And it’s not so much that they’re going to make everyone who’s has a PayPal wallet use PayPal stablecoin necessarily.

Ran Goldi: Probably not.

Yvette Bohanan: It’s their cash flow, it’s their efficiency, it’s their balance sheet. When we go back to what are they doing then as an issuer of their stablecoin, and they partnered with Paxos?

Ran Goldi: Yeah, yeah. Correct.

Yvette Bohanan: So they have their stablecoin, they have their partner Paxos. They’re basically leveraging the infrastructure there to do that.

Ran Goldi: Yeah. So, so Paxos is the licensed regulated entity by NYDFS, that is the issuer of that currency, and it is white labeled as PayPal through different agreements they have.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay, so this is huge. So that’s use case number one.

Ran Goldi: Yeah. Fair.

Yvette Bohanan: Let’s do another one. I think this is really interesting. Something clicked, right? Something clicked in the last 12 months where everyone just sort of went, I get it. But they’re all seeing something different about their business that they can do this with.

Ran Goldi: You are right. And I think another interesting use case all around is actually the banking angle. But not US banking angle, because the US banks, one might argue, don’t need stablecoins. They’re all connected to the Fed. If not, then they have Zelle and Fed now and whatnot. It’s all good.

But if you are a foreign bank and you are not a top tier bank, access to dollar is not great for you and you are probably not in the FX game, in terms of dollars. And what we’re seeing more and more is banks globally that are not huge banks, but like those five banks in Singapore I told you about, there’s now three banks in Brazil, BTG Pactual, which is actually the first or second bank actually, Braza Bank, another bank in Brazil. So you can go and you can open a stablecoin account.

Now why does it matter for them? Because their clients are having a hard time getting dollar access and getting good dollar movement. And also now they become FX banks because now they tell their clients open a stablecoin account with me. But obviously that person, yes, now maybe they want to get stablecoins, but they need this in Brazilian Real. So now this bank is having another great revenue stream that they didn’t have before, thanks to stablecoins.

Yvette Bohanan: I get it. Just to make sure we’re really super clear here, their client comes in, opens the account, a stablecoin account. What kind of stablecoin?

Ran Goldi: So stablecoins are surprisingly, I would say regional and also in a way cultural. I’ll try to explain that. If you are in the US, there’s no other stablecoin for you probably than USDC. It’s a public company called Circle. You can see them on Trading View or your interactive brokers, whatever. Great.

If you’re going to Singapore or Latin America, then it’s actually USDT, which is this company called Tether, that in the US used to be considered as a pariah, not anymore, thank God. But it wasn’t accepted in the US and people abroad actually thought of Circle as it’s like this US company we don’t know of. Their president could shut them down every minute. They’ll take our money away. We don’t want to trust that currency. We actually want USDT, which is issued by this company in the Bermuda Islands that never let us down, whatever. So it’s very interesting.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s just psychographic. That’s like psychographic, demographic, whatever the way people think about money.

Ran Goldi: A hundred percent. And I just want to say that the interesting use case is when that merchant in Brazil is, let’s say, a Worldpay merchant. And this is a true story. Worldpay has obviously merchants everywhere. Their merchants do not, sometimes they want to be accepting payments in the US or UK, Europe, by Worldpay, but they don’t have a Euro pound account.

They want to get their disbursement, their settlement as a merchant in Brazilian Real, in a Brazilian bank. Worldpay supports that. That’s great. But it takes time. And it takes several days. And they launched, I think like two, three years ago already, this thing called merchant settlement with stablecoins.

But you’re right that in the last 12 months it clicked because everything sort of fits. There’s more regulation in Brazil. The bank support it. Every new bank user, which is like 80 million in Brazil, has a stablecoin account now. It all sort of clicked to this moment in time now where people are actually asking for it.

And as you know, in payments, it’s all about what’s coming from the grassroots. It’s not about what the corporates or anyone up top wants.

Yvette Bohanan: Right, right. It’s absolutely true. And fascinating that every new bank user has a stablecoin account. That I didn’t realize. I knew it was available, but wow. Okay. That’s a tipping point right there.

So with your comment about sort of this, for better or worse, psychographic, demographic, how you think about these companies? And right, wrong, or indifferent, a lot of times in the US, the US perspective is, Well, what is this going to do to the US dollar, to fiat, when all these things really start to kind of mobilize, all the gears start going in all of these countries. Right now, a lot of stablecoins are actually fundamentally pegged to the US dollar. I would imagine that-

Ran Goldi: 99.5%.

Yvette Bohanan: 99.5%, right? So are we reinforcing, ultimately, the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency? Are we laying the groundwork that’s a global economy that’s less reliant on the dollar? If you hit a crystal ball, how are you envisioning this sort of laying out when you start thinking about these use cases?

And I think the one about the banks opening up their new revenue pool, if you will, of FX, because that has been largely controlled by the top, top tier banks globally, right? That’s huge for them. But what’s the intended and unintended consequence potentially here? Which way do you think this is going to go?

Ran Goldi: Unfortunately I’m not that smart. I will say that I think about this same question again and again, every time where I see more issuers on either side, US dollar or non-US dollar. Look, right now, this is obviously great for the US because there are more and more dollars being deposited in US financial institutions. And when you put money at Circle, for example, that now has about $74 billion in circulation of USDC, they’re held by BlackRock, they’re held by Bank of New York Mellon. That’s great for the US economy, all that that is happening, the interest being accrued on that, behind the scenes, et cetera. I think what it actually does is that it actually antagonizes or motivates other countries to action faster.

And I think that if you see what’s happening in Europe, I’m not sure they want US stablecoins there for the long run. I think they’re going to make it much harder for US issuers to issue US dollars in a way on European soil. And you already see that through legislation. You also see every country in the last year waking up to say, and maybe that’s like a large corporate in that country, not necessarily the government waking up to say, again, either if it’s the government, we need legislation for stablecoins, or if corporates, why are we giving this away to US issuers?

And now you’ve see in Brazil, there’s a currency called BRL1 that’s already a billion Brazilian real, right? I think the BRICS countries are now motivated even more, for example, to create a faster rail. I don’t know what’s the global outcomes over time, unfortunately for me, but I do believe that this has opened some sort of an arm race to control digital rails.

Yvette Bohanan: I think it has. I would agree with you. And it’s a little bit like everything old is new again. And you’ve been at this a long time, right? And you’ve seen sort of the genesis of crypto. The morph into stablecoins. You were on the Facebook Meta Journey with Diem Novi, eventually is what it was called. I do have, just by the way, the Libra book that was written about how Libra was going to become the new global banking system at Facebook.

These things, it’s a fascinating journey, but what we’re talking about today is a very different conversation about how this technology would be applied than if we were talking to each other even three years ago or five years ago. And it’s going back to national preference, control of the economy in a country, legislation, regulation. And it’s almost the antithesis of the original Bitcoin paper, right? It’s gone so far in one direction, it’s actually come right back on itself. So I don’t know. Is that a good thing or are we just overcomplicating ourselves at this point?

Ran Goldi: I always go back to, I guess to basics here, thinking that even Bitcoin, the first paper published in 2009, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, whatever we want to call it, we’re just making too much fuss about it. Because zoom out, it’s just a natural evolution of our financial systems, right?

And yes, maybe it’s moving faster than the movement from gold back reserve to non-gold back, from dollars to zeros and ones in a bank account, to cards and plastic. It is just evolution, right, of money. And I can bet, I’m willing to bet most blockchains that are alive today and most stablecoins that are alive today won’t be here in a decade.

What we are experiencing right now is just a burst of technology meeting a burst of openness in regulation that actually meets an issue, which is dollar access in the world. And that has created this perfect moment in time and it helps us to evolve money now faster with technology.

But I think if we’ll look at, zoom out probably in a hundred year perspective, it’s just another moment when we did a small jump to a new type of tech and built on top of that the next services and apps that we will have. I’m excited to be part of it, but I take it in proportion.

Yvette Bohanan: I think that is a very measured, insane approach. It probably keeps you very grounded when you’re going through all of this right now.

But what about CBDC? We’ve seen the US Project Hamilton, we talked with the head of that at one point in the US, then part of the Genius Act was like, we’re not doing CBDC here in the US, and then we just heard Europe say, Hey, the EU is moving forward with the next phase of the digital euro. We see Brazil again, we talk about Brazil, Pix is huge, it’s enormous, it’s the case study of how to do a fast payment system. And then they come along and say, and we’re going to do a CBDC.

Where do you see the CBDCs fitting into the equation here right now?

Ran Goldi: I think that term confused a lot of people. I think that people think that a CBDC necessarily means that the government will issue everyone a wallet or something, that the government will issue you a coin. I don’t think that’s what’s going to go down or that’s what’s going to happen.

I think that the same way that now several issuers have issued a currency that we go and buy and use, I think the government will issue a currency, which is really, it’s not a currency. It’s really a digital representation of whatever it is today to the banks that are, you know, maybe the Fed will issue that to the banks that are connected to the Fed for repo purposes, right?

I do not believe that any government, other than some governments that have done this that are on the different spectrum of Western civilization and values, I don’t think that any government wants to control all the wallets of their citizens. I think that the government is very happy that there are middle mans in different forms of banks along the chain that eventually serve the individual. And I think that it makes sense. The government will also upgrade its form of money that it transacts with major banks in the ecosystem between the central bank and other banks, right?

So when I hear CBDC, I hear a central bank wants to upgrade the financial infrastructure between them and the banking system that talks to them. And I’m all for that, but that’s what it is.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. No, I agree. And I think the numbers prove that out, right? All of the piloting, all the stuff globally, if you kind of take a step back, it’s the wholesale CDBC that’s really people have doubled down on not so much the retail. Yeah, that makes sense. Total sense.

So we haven’t talked about smart contracts, kind of guide all of this sort of. We wave our hands and say, I put money in and I move money here and it’s all kind of being done through code, right, and through smart contracts, which have a lot of potential. We also haven’t talked about agentic.

Ran Goldi: Oh wow. I don’t know if you can do that. Blockchain, agentic, AI. Too much.

Yvette Bohanan: Too much. But wait, it seems like it’s not that far apart. They’re like first cousins, you know? It’s like agentic commerce, smart contracts lend themselves to agentic, right? In your perspective, when you’re talking with developers and when you’re looking at these stacks and everything, do these things play together well, or is it the same thing essentially, or is it two distinct things that are coming together kind of like chocolate and peanut butter, and we’re making a Reese’s Peanut butter cup?

Ran Goldi: All right, so demystifying smart contracts and cousins. So real quickly, smart contracts is just programmable money, right? It means that I can create a place on the blockchain that if I sent, let’s say, a dollar to that contract, it will know that if that dollar came from Goldi, he needs to send $1 to Yvette. That’s it. I can program money, which is perfect, which is great. It’s underutilized right now in the world. Let’s settle with that, that there’s a lot to do with it.

Agentic commerce. I think when people say that with relation to stablecoins, I think what they, what I believe they’re really saying is that we now programmatically can allow access to an account. This used to be a bank account, but we know access to that is hard programmatically from just a programmer at home, right? Even with Plaid and everything. Now I can access this wallet on the blockchain rather easily, and I can do micro transactions, or I can send a dollar and it will hit within 10 seconds and I can get a receipt for that.

And if this is like buying something regularly, then it could be through some sort of AI that I write to recognize that I am in need of that product, and then hit my wallet, send money, get a receipt. And because this is digital money, it’s almost native to AI which is a digital human in a way that needs to do actions, right? And I think that’s what they say agentic commerce.

If we’re already at this, I want to demystify two more things. TradFi and DeFi, right?

Yvette Bohanan: Yes.

Ran Goldi: TradFi, when people say that, they mean traditional finance. They mean financial services that are offered and issued, controlled by a central entity. Like I will go to a bank and I will ask for a loan, but I’m going to a bank. There’s a central entity, and they hold my account and so forth. My money’s not their money.

When people say DeFi, they mean decentralized finance. And decentralized finance means that, it talks about a world where I have a wallet on the blockchain, it’s my wallet. No one else have access to move funds from that wallet but me.

I can go to a DeFi website, a decentralized finance website. In that website, there are people who are willing to give away loans. To get a loan, all I need to do is click a button that says connect wallet, and then that website tell these loan providers how much money I can put as collateral.

And I brought my own assets. I clicked connect. It took one second, and now lenders are looking at how much I can give as collateral and they’re offering me loans one by one. I can click one, I can get a loan. They take my collateral, all of that will be done by smart contracts that program this entire process. Behind the scenes, no human was involved.

So I can bring my own account, connect to a loan website, take a loan. Unlike in traditional finance, when I need to come myself, I need to open an account. I have a now account with that central entity. My account is over there, control, provision, et cetera. And that is everything together from smart contract to DeFi to agentic.

Yvette Bohanan: Wow. Well done, well done, Goldi. Thank you. That kind of paints a very, very interesting picture of the world and where this could lead to. Just unleashes a lot and I think that maybe gets back to the heart of the very, very, very original origin story of all this too, right?

It’s not that it’s unregulated completely. It’s not that it’s not tied to real quote unquote real currency like fiat or anything like that, but that it just sort of changes the game in a number of ways for people and individuals and businesses. Pretty interesting territory that we’re heading for. So this has been lovely, always talking with you

Ran Goldi: Same.

Yvette Bohanan: If we have to wrap up, I have one more question for you, which is we have a lot of people listening to this podcast, lots of different people from lots of different walks of life, every stakeholder’s trying to figure out their stablecoin strategy, right?

You’re talking to these people all the time. Even if the strategy is like, we’re just going to wait, we’re still not ready, which I’m sure there’s those folks out there, but what’s the cost of waiting too long? What’s too long and what’s the cost of waiting too long?

Ran Goldi: I think what’s happening now is there’s a lot of clients, whether those are retail or businesses that are looking for, as always, faster rail solutions, and they now hear more and more about this thing called stablecoins, and they’re actually asking and looking for stablecoin solutions. Maybe it will fit them, maybe not, but the problem is right now that most companies, again, they don’t offer those.

But they also are not hearing any requests and it’s not because there aren’t any requests by these old, by these incumbents, let’s say, it’s because their clients are actually going to those companies who advertise that this is what they do. So you have companies that have been in the business for 20 years losing their business percent by percent, by small fintechs globally. They’re now serving their client base with stablecoins.

And if those incumbents won’t wake up soon enough, they will find the digital version of themselves looking at them in the mirror eating their lunch. And we already see that. We already see that the fintechs that were, created 10, 15 years ago, you know, the Revoluts of the world, they had to adapt to stablecoins, but it was hard for them. There are other fintechs who couldn’t and are now eaten by these stablecoin native companies.

So I think the cost of not thinking of a strategy is 10 to 30% of your client base might disappear over the next two, three years, and you wouldn’t even notice because it will just be ankle biters bit by bit.

Yvette Bohanan: Interesting. So that’s providers. What about companies, like the company we were talking about, the example we gave of Fireblocks paying a vendor overseas. I’m a company now and I need a strategy, I think, but I’m not sure.

Ran Goldi: So I don’t think you do really, if you’re a company. I think that if you’re a company, even if you are, maybe even if you’re Facebook Meta right, then you need whoever is dealing with your payments, whoever is managing your treasury, whoever is doing financial operations for you to be aware that there is this very fast rail called blockchain.

Maybe it’s great for your business, for certain aspects, maybe it isn’t. If you are a company that is doing a lot of payment acceptance, but also disbursement, then you’ve got to learn about this because probably your users somewhere around the world are crying for a better service around disbursement.

But if you are just a company that is selling electronics and you have a payments provider, I don’t know, Worldpay, Nuvei, Checkout that is doing payment acceptance for you, all you need to do at this point in the world, which is why I’m so happy we’re here, is you just need to ask them and they will give you that because they already have it.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s wonderful.

Ran Goldi: Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: The strategy is the question to your vendor.

Ran Goldi: Depends who you are, but yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. Excellent. All right, Goldi. It’s just been great, I so appreciate it, I know how busy you are.

Thank you for joining us for this podcast and sitting down and having a chat and kind of getting to the real real with us. I think it just helps everybody. There’s so much hype going on right now and we always appreciate your time, so thank you.

Ran Goldi: So happy to be here and thank you for having me again. Thank you so much.

Yvette Bohanan: And to all of you listening, thanks for joining us and until next time, keep up the good work. Bye for now.