Name: Fireblocks Stablecoins in Motion
Uploaded: 2025-08-07T16:31:12.997Z
Duration: 1 h 15 min 12 s
Description: Fireblocks Stablecoins in Motion

Transcript for "Fireblocks Stablecoins in Motion": Welcome, everyone. I'm Goldie, s v p of payments and network in Fireblocks, and thank you for joining us for this super exciting product webinar where we're gonna focus on how some of the greatest companies in our space have built their stablecoin offerings. Last year, the Fireblocks platform has processed more than $1,500,000,000,000 of stablecoins. What started in 2020 as only 20% of our total volume now accounts for 55% of the volume that goes through our platform. So, obviously, we look at stablecoins very carefully. And today, we're not gonna talk about why stablecoins because you probably know why. Today, we're gonna talk about how these companies have built their product, how did they bring their vision to life through these offerings, and how are they leveraging the Fireblocks infrastructure. So we're gonna walk through the products of four different companies. They are live. They are solving real payment problems, and they're doing that for real customers today. We're gonna start off with Ben O'Neil, who oversees money movement at Bridge, now part of Stripe. He's gonna walk us through how a stablecoin native company is offering fintechs and merchants to have a plug and play access to stablecoins globally today. Then we're gonna also talk to Andre Massey, the COO and cofounder of Conduit. He's gonna share with us exactly how cross border b two b payments is being offered to their clients and how they can actually use Conduit to do those flows. Then Bill Manji, the SVP and head of crypto for WallPay, is gonna take us through how one of the largest merchant acquirers in in the world, basically, has started with merchant settlement with stable coins and quickly evolved into payouts. We're gonna see how exactly that is coming into production and how Fireblocks is playing a part of that. And then we're gonna wrap it up with our very best, Chris Maurice, the CEO and cofounder of Yellowcard. He's gonna show us how their treasury portal that they've built is helping businesses across Africa to manage USD liquidity, to move capital across borders, and to settle in local currencies using stablecoins. And you know that Africa is not an easy place to do all of that. Everything inside their own purpose built product. So, again, remember, in this series, we're not gonna focus on the why stablecoins because, again, you already know why stablecoins. They're faster. Most of the times, they're probably cheaper. Does it mean they're solving any payments problem that you have? Probably not. But they are one of those tools that you need in your payment stack. So let's dive right into it, and let's see how Fireblocks infrastructure has enabled those amazing products to come to life. Fine. So we're now with Bridge. Bridge is, if you haven't been under a rock for the last year, has been probably one of the first companies that found real product market fit in this space of stable coins with the amazing product they've built. And we have with us Ben O'Neil, who's the head of money movement for Bridge. Hey, Ben. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Just happy to be here. Thank you for joining us for this product series. And, again, I I know that, obviously, you played a a crucial part, for those who don't know in Bridge Success, really behind the scenes and still playing a crucial part in Bridge Success. So it's great to have you. Just like Fireblocks under the hood, crucial part of our product, crucial part of our success as well. Thank you. And we're proud to be obviously part of your journey. But, Ben, really, let let's get let's get to it. You you've been to Messari, by the way, before for those who don't know you, and you've obviously been to the world of crypto before. But as you walk into Bridge, this was a combination of of fiat and crypto. That was, I assume, the vision of Bridge. How did that vision and maybe if you can tell us in a bit of what that was, and how did that actually materialize into the product? Absolutely. I mean, like, the product that you see today was actually, came about from the pain points that our team felt, right, in building other payment products in crypto and trying to figure out how do you utilize stablecoin rails, how do you convert it into fiat, how do you pair those things together. We started by building that and finding that you couldn't actually do that well. And once we started to build that and build other products, that's the product that people wanted. Right? And so we kinda shifted focus in early twenty twenty three. This was before I joined into building just that stablecoin orchestration rail. Right? The best way to convert stablecoins into dollars and dollars and stablecoins for anyone building, you know, payment fintech finance type applications on crypto rails. Amazing. And, again, for those who don't know, that ended up getting acquired by Stripe for $1,100,000,000 and now powering so many amazing products and features that Stripe has launched recently. But let's actually look at the product. Let's dive into this. And and, Ben, I'm really curious, and I think the people that are watching this are probably thinking as well. If I'm a from a bridge client, what can I really do with the product? How does it look like? What does it feel? If you can take us through that, that would be great. Totally. So share my screen, and we can dive in. Like, high high level, I just wanna talk about talk about who uses Bridge. Why do people use Bridge? Right? It started as just crypto on and off ramps, but over the past couple of years, it's really expanded into this global financial system. Right? Things like cross border payments and payouts. Right? How do you get money from The US to individuals, creators around the world that wanna be able to get paid in and hold dollars. Right? In that dollar at same sense dollar access. Right? That if you're in a country in an environment with high inflation and you wanna hold dollars in your wallet and as a way of saving your own capital, how can you do that in an efficient manner that doesn't cost you multiple percentage points of FX and hops and skips and jumps, but doing that in a really efficient way through stablecoins. We also do treasury management. Right? I think one of the big use cases that has been publicized is our friendly global, you know, space Internet company that we help move money around the world via stablecoins. Right? Simply allowing them to go from local currencies where they collect revenues into stablecoins and moving it to where their costs are, right, where their headquarters are, etcetera. And then most recently, we launched a borderless card program. Right? Again, backed by dollar stablecoins, but the ability to spend anywhere in the world in your home country and issue to anyone, globally as well. So we're really at the core of it is trying to make money move on a global manner, right, as fast as a computer would expect it to move. Right? And really globalizing that dollar access to anyone that can use it. So what does that look like for a developer? Right? If you wanted to build on top of bridge, what does that mean? We own kind of the three stacks. Right? We own the compliance for you. We own the charity management for you, and then we own the underlying technical infrastructure for you. Right? So when you when you onboard a bridge, when you want a user to come in, like, the first thing you're gonna do is actually allow your users to onboard. Right? How do they get financial infrastructure in The US? Right? We're gonna give you the KYC infrastructure. Right? We're gonna allow you to do that through our API that you can see here on the right to pull that information from Bridge and service it in your application in a very seamless manner. Right? So you can think about what you wanna do, what your business is, and not have to worry about The US based compliance systems that we will handle handle under the hood. Right? All through a very seamless API. Right? And then kind of as you get that API as you get that information processed from your users, we will process it. Right? We will run the checks on those users. We will run all those systems, the EDD, etcetera. And all you get all you have to worry about is servicing. Great. Success. Let's move on. Let's get you access. Right? And what that does under the hood is this. Right? You've now opened and allowed your user to create a lot of different products, right, utilizing stablecoins. Right? Things like a virtual account in their own name that can accept dollars locally in The US. Things like a wallet. Right? That is partly built on Fireblocks. Right? With that security of where they can hold crypto. Right? Stable coins especially. And then, you know, paying via wire, ACH, SEPA in Europe, or even via card. Right? All through these rails, all built on stablecoins. Right? So this is all we've done via API that under the hood just moves the crypto, on your behalf and seamlessly allows for it to feel like a native fintech experience. Right? We've abstracted away a lot of that complexity that historically has been associated with, wallets and, private keys and things like that through our relationship, you know, with Fireblocks and through the APIs that we've been able to build. So I'm not a product person that's, running a a payments company, over a fintech in Latin America or a payments company in The US or The UK, and I want to start creating my markets in The US. What you're basically what you just showed right now basically says, okay. You don't need to get these extra licenses. You can actually connect us as Bridge as a client. We take over this onboarding KYC through the API code that you showed there on the right, and then you can build any of these products. Right? Like the wallet, the pay, that is all part of the the product suite that Bridge is offering today to its to its clients. Am I getting this right? Exactly right. Right. We the majority of our customers don't have any presence in The US. Right? They don't have an NC in The US. They don't have bank accounts in The US. They don't have licensing in The US. That's what we provide to them. Right? We have our state level and our federal licensure. Right? And then we manually or we operate all of that the the operations of the cash in, the cash out, the liquidity and charity management banking relationships on their behalf. Right? So you can launch in The US by integrating APIs and not have to think about, you know, actually going live and getting licensed and having the regulator relationships there that fintechs over the last decade have had to do. And and, again, this is a a product that I know that a lot of these a lot of these companies are now coming in, stepping into our space for the first time. A lot of the top BSPs, a lot of the top top permanent companies around the world. I believe this is exactly part of these relationships and products they wanna use to at least get into this world, through you guys, again, a trusted entity, especially, you know, part of Stripe, obviously, and the Visa card, program that you guys issued. So thank you for really helping us to, you know, demystify what bridge is in terms of the product and how it feels. And, again, you know, there's actually a lot of companies out there right now, a lot of entrepreneurs that have seen the success of Bridge, have seen, okay, money movement through APIs. Yes. This is the future. This is where it's going, especially with, you know, AgenT eCommerce and a lot of different buzzwords that I don't wanna put into this, webinar as well. But, what what would be the the one product advice you would maybe, wanna give them as they're thinking about launching their stablecoins related, startup right now? Yeah. While stablecoins in the blockchain are this new paradigm, right, they're brand new, like, payments and the cussing funds is, like, it's a it's a tried and true business, and don't don't skip out on compliance. Right? Don't skip out on money laundering on compliance with KYC. Right? No one, like, likes to talk about it. It's not a sexy part of the business, but that's how you succeed, is by doing that right and ensuring that you live to see another day by not getting shut down by these own goals. Right? So don't just think about the product. Don't just think about the product experience and the growth and the onboarding, but do it the right way from the ground up, and you will watch the people that you are competing with cut those corners and get themselves hurt by not doing that. So really take compliance seriously. Take security seriously, out of the gate. You're you're moving people's money, and there's nothing more serious than that. I I completely agree. And and, obviously, the way you talk about compliance and how a lot of people, you know, sort of do not think about that, maybe it's the first thing they do is they think about stablecoin APIs. This company will build. They will run faster, etcetera. And I I will only add, obviously, from Fireblocks perspective, think about scale, think about security, and, obviously, this is why I believe our partnership is working together. That, you know, the way that that we would wanted that we can help you guys scale, You build this amazing business that built in compliance into that and can create all that product for the clients that are now using you. Again, Ben, thank you so much for demystifying this, and thank you for giving us your time of day. Good luck in, whatever Bridge and Strep ends up doing right now. I I'm sure it's gonna be amazing because everything you've launched the last two months has probably, rocked the world. Thank you. Your best. Thank you. Andre Messi, the COO and cofounder of Conduit. Conduit, if you haven't heard about Conduit up until now, well, they're probably one of the largest companies out there that have actually adopted stable coins as a means of transacting and helping their businesses. They've been around since 2021. They've most recently raised a $36,000,000 series a, and they were also selected for Fireblocks payments company of the year. Andre, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for the award last year. So it's good to be recognized by another provider that we consider to be the golden standard in one infrastructure. I'm looking forward to talking about that today. But thank you for the awards. Thank you for the kind words. I'm looking forward to a always fun, always healthy conversation about stablecoins. Perfect. And and I think, you know, for the for the people watching this, I believe Andrew and I are very much, you know, single-minded about how to think about Stablecoins that, you know, they're very important. They're very good. They're not gonna solve the entire world problems on payments. And that's why Conduit and using them very specifically for accounts or payable or receivable solution for cross border. But, Andre, I'll I'll let you take it from here. If you can tell us really briefly about really what's the solution that Conduit is is offering today and then just feel free to take us right into it. Yeah. Absolutely. So so Conduit is a b to b cross border payment platform, that leverages stable points on the back end. In its simplest form, I would say Conduit essentially performs two main tasks for its clients. One, we do FX conversions, leveraging Stablecoins. So we convert the currency that our clients have into the currency that our clients need to settle specific invoices. We do that for both fiat and stablecoins, and so we allow people to move clients to move very seamlessly between the two. And the second thing that we do is we facilitate third party payments on behalf of our clients, allowing them to pay any of their counterparties or suppliers on a global scale. And so we do the conversion and the payout. We really pride ourselves in being a one stop shop for all of your payment needs, and we do that faster, cheaper, and more lively than anyone we've come across in the space. So I I really wanna see how the product actually looks like because I promised people that this series is not just about the why stable coins because, you know, people sort of know that. It's really about the how. So if I'm a conduit client, I log in, I open an account, I onboard into conduit, what's my experience? What do I Yeah. Absolutely. So, if you're a mess, not to mention, there's two ways, to interact with the Conway product. One that demos really well and one that doesn't. So we have a web app and a UI, that a lot of our clients enjoy using, and we have an API which doesn't demo just as well, but that allows our fintech or PSP clients who do higher volumes of transactions to do so product automatically. And so for today's purpose, we'll be walking through, more of a UI web app demo, but keep in mind, you can also access Cognigit rails via API as well. Alright. So here we are. We're logged in to the conduit web app, where we'll be demoing the very kind of fundamental functionality that we offer to all of our clients. We'll walk through, what we call the accounts payable use case. So effectively invoice settlement where a client comes to us with a specific invoice that they're looking to pay, typically cross border and typically in a currency, that they do not bank with day to day. So you see here, there are three in this case of this demo account, there are three crypto wallets that are self custodial that are powered by Fireblocks, that our clients can use and fund at any point in time. So here, from a client, I can select each of those crypto wallets to fund a stable coin to fiat transaction. All I have to do is I select one, I get my deposit instructions, and then I can fund each individual wallet. By the way, if they can just pause you for a second. Like, is that do you see any, jurisdictional difference on the demand between USDC and USDT? Because you guys, I know, are, you know, global company, but interesting to get your view. Yeah. Absolutely. I would say in emerging markets, USDT, Entron is most liquid. There's been significant investment by local crypto exchanges to facilitate very cheap and seamless on and off ramping into USDT on Tron. And so you've seen very meaningful volumes. And so payers like, Nigeria and Naira or Permian Peso, for instance, traded really well against USDT on Tron. In other jurisdictions like The US, Circle has done a lot of work, to build good connectivity, and and seamless integration with USD. And so in The US, as an example, USDC is predominantly used. And so, yes, it very much depends by jurisdiction. And typically, the the the main factor determining adoption is the access to local on and off ramps via the local crypto exchanges and and how liquid those are. Yeah. That makes sense. And and I I can tell that your total balance you you show here, it's interesting. You guys chose to show it in USD terms. Right? Specifically, and not to say here's your balance and this and that and just merge it. Is that part of, like, a a philosophy? Or Yeah. That's part of of how we see stable points playing out in many ways. Here in this case, for this demo account, I'm using a Conduit account. Conduit is a US company. We live our lives in US dollars. We report in US dollars, and so it just made sense for us to have USD here. We can also support other, denominations, other currencies, depending on each of their clients. And for us, it's important to keep in mind, this those stable points here are functional forms of money, that you can use, to go about, you know, paying your suppliers and and selling invoices. And so for us, it's important to be to have them be considered money and and to denominate them in the currency of choice is yeah. It's very much kind of a part of our philosophy of, determining and identifying stablecoins as functional form of money. The highest utility form of money, I'm gonna add. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. I interrupted you throughout the demo. Go ahead. No. All good. And then and so you see those those three accounts, we'll you know, you can deposit, you can withdraw, very seamlessly. Again, this is the piece of the puzzle that is powered, by Fireblocks. Those wallets are all self custodial, owned and operated by the clients themselves. But the meat of the conversation I expect is gonna be how do we then turn those USDC or USDT into, functional local fiat. And so in this case here, let's run an example here why I'm using a 100 USDC on Ethereum from my 444 USDC balance, to settle an invoice in Brazil again. So the way our platform works is you get live quoting all day every day, and so you would see here an expiration window. You see exactly how much, you would be getting for 100. Typically, because the main use case is an invoice settlement, use case, our clients would come in and say, hey. I need to pay 500 brazilian ai to this contractor or this supplier of mine. And so they come in, and we actually reverse engineer the correct amount of USDC or USDT in this case to be, deducted from the account. From that point, super important for us, we need to determine a sender. Some of our clients are fintechs or TSPs, and so it is very important for us to have information about the ultimate sender. This is a compliance requirement here, for travel purposes among other things. And so here, we'll pretend it's a Kenyan brewery paying, I don't know, some supplier based in Brazil. The recipient is, in this case, it's it's conduit. We need to select the payment purpose, in this case, payment for business services, and then we request, supporting documentation here. So typically that looks like an invoice, especially for invoice elements. We request for you to upload the invoice. And then as soon as you do that, so here you can select, which document type this is. In this case, this is an invoice. Add the document, and then you click continue. And then you see here the transaction is created exactly the you the way you'd want it to, and then you click confirm. And as soon as you do that, then you will receive, again, supported documentation, just an overview. And this transaction within the next two minutes, the recipient should be receiving the BRL. And so it is as simple as that. You can then go to your account and see the specific transaction here. Got created. It's going through compliance review. That's an automated process that we have, and you see all of the different details. Amazing. And and, you know, you said, and and I think by the way, this is obviously super easy. And, and I think that, you know, a lot of people that I I I talk to, they they sort of come to us and they say, all these companies, you know, Fireblocks, Condo, you all build these new UIs. Can you also take, take over my Fiat UIs that that, you know, they don't like those those interviews anymore in a way. Can you also connect to my banks, etcetera? But but you were talking about liquidity, and it was interesting how, you said that it depends on, you know, who invested where. So I guess that, you know, I I was fortunate to see conduit scale from from where we are and Fireblocks scaled to, again, you know, moving a lot of money these days. For us, when we started Conduit, and this is, you know, credit to to Kirill who's worked in FinTech, our CEO and and cofounder. We made the very explicit decision that we were not going to be reliant and handcuffed by other providers as much as possible. And so what that means is from the onset, we decided we were gonna do the hard work of building as close to the metal as we could in order to own the client experience as much as possible. And the reason why I'm putting so much emphasis on this is right now, it could take us a month to integrate with another PSP or a middleware provider and claim that we support a thousand different currencies, and a thousand different corridors and, you know, a 150 payment methods. But the truth is when you do that, you become very quickly, you become commoditized. Right? You are sitting on top of somebody who's made its whole business around being easy to integrate with. You don't have control over the client experience. You don't have control over pricing. And you typically sit on top of a middleware provider that sits on top of a bank. And so when things go wrong, you have very limited visibility and ability into the problems and how you can actually solve them. And so for us, we've decided to build very close to the middle. Currently, we have integrations with close to 30 banks globally. That is as painful and as challenging as it sounds. When I mean 30 bank integrations, I mean technical integrations. I mean harmonizing compliance requirements to make sure that we collect everything upfront from our clients to be able to meet the expectations of those 30 banks. And that means meeting with many more than those 30 to decide, whether each partner, you know, makes sense for us or not. And so when you work with Conduit, you don't work with a middleware provider that's plugged into a couple of crypto exchanges. You work with a provider that works with all the large globally significant banks to source FX, with all of the large stable point issuers directly. You know, we've announced recently Circle as an investor and conduit. This is the kind of partnership that we strike to form that we strive to form, sorry, because it is important for us to be as close to the metal as possible in order to own the experience, own the pricing, and be able to live by our promises. I think it's super important what you said. And and one thing I do but differ, you said that, you know, then you can say that you do best execution. Well, surprise, all these companies still say they do best execution. But you're right. You're right. They they really don't. And you become an aggregator of an aggregator of an aggregator, and you don't even know And we've been talking a lot at Fireblocks on how some companies maybe they wanna start crypto remote, we call it. They'll use, you know, a third party quality provider that will help them come in that aggregates a lot of buffers. Yeah. Maybe it's great to start with, but just like Andrew Andrew said, if you really wanna control the experience, if you wanna make I think what you said is super critical. It's like if you wanna make promises, you can actually deliver, you need to control the infrastructure and I I totally agree with you. This was this was a great bit on the product and, honestly, your insight at at the end is really worth all of this. But, what what's what's, you know, what's the future? What's the plans for Conduit if if you don't mind sharing quickly? Yeah. I mean, the vision for us is to unleash cross border commerce, by fixing once and for all global payment rails. We if you look, you know, globally, there are millions of businesses that operate on the razor thin margins right now that are, being charged two, three, 5% per transaction, to pay their suppliers and that effectively kills the economics of running those businesses. For us, we wanna come to the rescue of those businesses and give them the tools to truly become significant on a global scale. And we feel like by solving payments once and for all, that's what we can do. And so Conduit, we built a web app that you sell, we built a product, but first and foremost, we are building a payment network. And so what does the future look like? The future looks like more corridors, more nodes, cheaper pricing, faster execution for us, for the clients that wanna plug into our network and for every single market participant that wants to participate in global commerce. So that's the future for us. Amazing. And we couldn't be more proud than, you know, to support you guys on this journey. And, again, you've become probably one of the most successful companies in this space with your, growth in the latest round of financing. So congrats. And, Andre, thank you so much. This was, an amazing segment. Thank you. Hope to see you again really soon in person. Yeah. Enjoy the conversation always, and so looking forward to our next one. Thank you. We're gonna do another deep dive with probably one of the most, you know, pioneering companies out there. This company has been in digital assets since 2022, at least, to the best of my knowledge, and probably one of the largest companies in the payments world, period. I'm obviously talking about Worldpay. And Worldpay, if you're not familiar with them, which would very much surprise me if you're watching this, is processing $2,400,000,000,000 a year, more than 55,000,000,000 transactions in a 100 countries. And we have no other than Nabil Mansi here today. Hey, Nabil. Hey, Goldie. Thanks for having me. No. Of course. Nabil, you, you know, other than being a a superstar in this space, basically, you know, you were the probably the the anarchist in the house that was pushing Willpay forward more than anyone else. I believe, your your personal background, if I remember correctly, you actually started consulting companies before you probably decided that's just too loose for you, and you decided you wanna rock the world of payments. Is that do I remember this correctly? Some something like that. Although, I hope my, performance review doesn't say the word anarchist in it. Or maybe it doesn't. I just don't know about it. I'm sure it does. They do call me for your performance review from time to time. But in any case, today, Naveela, I really wanna dive not on the why stable coins. I think we've done enough webinars and podcasts about that. I think, you know, in 2025, the has changed. The side guys right now is, yes, they're all in. Everyone believes this is a payments rail that they should adopt. It's a question of how. And Worldpay, again, being a pioneer in this space, has been doing this since 2022. And you guys started, with with one product. You're now scaling into another product. Can you tell us how you guys started? Yeah. So depending on how you define it, we've been in and around the crypto space for close to ten years in the sense that we've been a service provider to a number of businesses, in the industry. But to your point, we actively started using blockchain technologies ourselves to deliver new products and services in 2022. That started with a product that we call merchant settlement, which you and I have spoken about, before in which a numb number of payments companies now are offering. And what we're doing now is adding our second product, which we call stable coin payouts. Now that may sound very familiar to settlement, but those of you that work in the payment space will know that a settlement transaction is extremely different from a payout transaction, which, is exciting for us because it opens up an entirely new platform and use case and, client profile for stablecoins on our ecosystem, which we're excited to launch. And let's do a let's do a deep dive on the product, on merchant sell itself. So, Nabil, explain to us maybe what is the client experience when working on the Worldpay platform, which again, probably, you know, I remember you guys divide the world in, like, you know, take, make, manage, and and then additional services. And, obviously, merchant settlement is really part of that, I I believe, that take service. Right? You acquire funds and then you need to get them settled. But how does it work behind the scenes? Yeah. So as you mentioned, the core part of our business is what we call take payments. So this is really around enabling merchants, small and large, and across various geographies and verticals to accept payments from consumers. Those payments could be in the form of debit or credit cards, e wallets, bank transfers, or other local payment methods. And regardless of what payment method you as a merchant are accepting from consumers or whatever mix of payment methods, you need to tell your payment processor, in this case Worldpay, how you would like to receive the proceeds or what we call settlement of those transactions. So for example, let's say you are a coffee shop operating in New York City, a very, you know, multinational city in terms of the people that are there. You may have some people that come and pay you in debit and credit card or e wallet or, bank transfers or whatever. And those people may be from Europe, from The UK, from The Middle East, from Asia, or, of course, from The US and other parts of North And South America. And so those instruments or those payment methods that are being used to pay you as a coffee shop cover a variety of currencies at a minimum. And you need to tell us Worldpay, hey. I would like all of the money from that settled to me, the coffee shop, in dollars. Or I would like some in dollars and some in Canadian dollars or some in dollars and some in pounds. So depending on the merchant's requirements or needs, they essentially instruct us, and I can go into detail on how that works if that's of interest. But they they tell us we would like from you Worldpay to receive dollars or pounds or euros or a mix. And so essentially what we did is we added USDC as a currency option on that menu of settlement currencies. So now that coffee shop or whoever the merchant is can say, hey, Worldpay. I would like some or all of my settlement in stablecoins, specifically USDC. And we give them the ability to control that on a transaction by transaction basis. And I think, you know, vaguely, as much as you can share behind the the scenes, what what happens? What does Worldpay had to do, and how does that product works behind the scenes? Is it maybe like a challenge or two you can share for building that? Yeah. So, essentially, the way these things work, and it'll vary depending on the payment method of the processor, but we essentially set up different, what we call merchant identifiers or merchant IDs. And when you send a transaction to that merchant ID, it is what's included in that merchant ID is a few, elements, one of which is the settlement currency for that transaction. So if you send a transaction currency to merchant ID a and the settlement currency for that merchant ID is set as US dollars, any transactions that are received to merchant ID a would be settled to our client in US dollars. Similarly, if that merchant also had merchant ID b and the settlement currency was set as British pounds, any transactions the merchant sends to us on merchant ID b would be set settled to them in bridge towns. And so all we've done is we've added the ability for merchant ID to be set with the settlement currency of USDC. So let's say the merchant had merchant ID c and that had the settlement currency of USDC. Any transactions that the merchant sent to us using merchant IDC would be settled to them in USDC. And what's nice about this is it allows them to send transaction by transaction to whichever merchant ID they want. So They don't need to send everything to ID a or ID b or ID c and receive everything in USD or GBP or USDC. They can decide transaction by transaction and build that logic however they want. Amazing. And behind the scenes, and, obviously, we've built this together. Mhmm. We'll pay orchestrates the let's call that the on ramping of assets and sending through Fireblocks. And and, hopefully, you know, we'll add more and more currencies that that that people want over the next, I wanna hope, like, several months, or years. And and and this was really the first product we built. Recently, you guys have announced the the second product, which I think, as you said, it is different, it's super exciting, and I believe that you've waited for the right time. There couldn't be a better time really to launch it right now because that is probably the number one use case that everyone's talking about in 2025 is the product you've launched, which is payout. So tell us more in detail about that. How does that work? Yeah. So as you and I discussed earlier, our core business is around take payments, but we also have a very, very large and growing business in what we call make payments. And this is what we really call our payouts product set or capability set. And what this product set does is it allows our clients to make payouts to third party beneficiaries. So a client of Worldpay could use us to pay their customers, their employees, their vendors, other businesses that they need to, pay for partnerships or referrals or royalties or whatever it might be. So the way to think about it is we offer a very robust, sophisticated payouts platform that allows our clients to fund us with a variety of fiat currencies and then make payouts to beneficiaries, which again could be individuals, small businesses, or large businesses in over a 130 currencies and in over a 180 countries. So you basically fund WorldPay in dollars or euros or GBP or any other number of currencies. And then you use our platform to instruct us to pay out in up to a 130 currencies in over a 180 markets. And of those 130 currencies, we offer real time bank payout rails for over 80 of them. So we have really tremendous coverage for what we call, real time or near real time payouts around the world. So where we find clients interested in this is what we call businesses that have a need to make high frequency, low value payouts. So think about a marketplace that needs to payout its sellers every few days or every week, a gig economy company that needs to payout its workers or its contractors once a day or multiple times per day or once every few days, businesses that need to pay out refunds or compensation to consumers that are all around the world. So think about airlines or travel agencies for things like, canceled trips or disrupted trips or delayed baggage or things like that. Money service businesses that need to pay out beneficiaries around the world. And so what we essentially did or what we're in the process of doing is adding USDC as a payout currency option on that platform. So today, as I mentioned, we can payout in just over a 130 fiat currencies. What we're gonna be doing is adding USDC as call it the one hundred and thirty first payout currency option. And it just so happened that it's gonna be the not like, it's gonna be the first non fiat currency on the platform. And so same story, the merchant can fund WorldPay in their choice of fiat currency, and then essentially just send us a payout instruction via API or via file or on an online portal and tell us to pay out USDC to a beneficiary's wallet in a variety of markets. So that's the exactly the how I wanna double click on. Am I as a merchant of yours that's doing, you know, the make the make payouts? Do I need to understand anything about Stablecoins? No. No. No. You you you don't. So just like think about it if, like, you're a US business that wants to use Worldpay to pay out in real time in Turkey in Turkish lira. You as The US business don't need to have an entity in Turkey. You don't need to have a bank account in Turkey. You don't need to know anything about the clearing system in Turkey. You don't need to have an FX facility for Turkish lira. You just pay us dollars and tell us, hey, Worldpay. I'd like you to pay out this beneficiary in Turkey. We take care of everything else. We take care of the connectivity to the clearing system. We take care of the foreign exchange. We take care of the reporting and reconciliation. We take care of, you know, ensuring the funds get to the recipient and updating you, our client, on the status of that payment. So in a similar fashion, we've kind of abstracted away or obscured away the need for the client to have anything to do with Blockchain or USDC. The client does not need a wallet. They don't need to give the beneficiary the wallet. They don't need to convert fee up to USDC. They don't need to know how to submit an on chain transaction. They don't need to know how to pay gas fees or calculate gas fees. All of that happens in the back end. They just tell us, hey, WorldPay. We'd like you to pay x amount of USDC to this customer, and here's their wallet address. We take care of the rest. We convert their fiat into USDC. We instruct the settlement of that USDC to the beneficiary. We screen the wallet before we send money to that beneficiary to make sure it's not associated with, you know, a sanctioned entity or illicit activity, things like that. And then we take care of paying the gas fees and then send that all back in a nice, neat, and tidy reporting and reconciliation package, which is identical to what the client receives for its existing fee up payouts with Worldpay. So there there's no need to build anything new or do anything new as it relates to stable points of blockchain. And you guys, I believe, you've you you published this way back then that you've achieved, like, 50% faster efficiency settlement times for the merchant settlement part. Is that the same rough, I guess, KPI that you've set for this product as well? I think it depends. If you think about, like, settling a merchant in USDC on the first use case we talked about, you know, if they're a US client of WorldPay, you you have a few different options for how we settle you. So we could settle you in The US via next day ACH. We could settle you via same day ACH. We could settle you via Fedwire. And then soon, if your bank account supports it, potentially via RTP or FedNow. Now if we're settling you via next day ACH and move your settlement to USDC settlement, you're gonna get your money, almost a day faster. If you were settling historically via same day ACH and now you move to USDC, you might get a few hours faster. If you were settling via Fedwire and move it to USDC, you might get it a few minutes faster or potentially half an hour faster. So it really depends on, like, what the merchant was using before and what they're using now in terms of the speed improvement, and that story is similarly true on the payout side. So for example, if you were paying a beneficiary in The UK using faster payments, if I'm being honest, you're not gonna get the beneficiaries are not gonna get their money faster if they're being paid out via USDC because UK faster payments clears near instantly, as does USDC on most blockchains. So the timing is, like, pretty equal. But if you're telling Worldpay to pay out a beneficiary in some, exotic market that doesn't have real time payouts and you're having to use a Swiftwire, and you move from that to now paying out the beneficiary in USDC, that beneficiary is gonna get their money probably a few days quicker. So it's a, you know, orders of magnitude faster. So it really depends on, like, what was the alternative that you would have used and what does that mean in terms of how it compares to USDC. And I and I think that's important because a lot of people are, you know, in this mindset that it's all or nothing. Right? That stablecoins are either curing the world of payments or they're worth nothing. And the reality is No. Nothing in payments is all or nothing as you know. It there there's no, like, one size fits all payment rail that just, like, disrupted the ones that have come before. It's we get lots of different innovations and rails that sit side by side that are good for different audiences and different use cases. And in my view, Stablecoin is another one. It's an interesting one. It's a useful one, but I don't view it as something that's just gonna displace and replace everything. It's it's gonna find its audience and its use cases just like all those other ones have. So that was awesome. I again, I really like that we're talking about products, not about, I don't know, just vision and everything. But there is some place for vision because you folks have been the first tier one of the first at least, as you said, ten years ago already. You've built merchant settlement. You've iterated. You're scaled. You're now doing payouts. How are you thinking about the next few years with digital asset based products? Is there something your clients are already asking, or how are you looking at this? And, you know, the shameless, question is where where or how did we fit in into your plans? You have fit in everywhere so far. So Fireblocks has been a key partner for us in building the settlement use case, which is the first one in 2022, and now also is a key launch and design partner in our payout use case, which will be going live later this year. And I'm I'm sure you guys will have some degree of influence or some hand in anything we do on the treasury management side as relates to stablecoins just given, you know, the fact that you're already integrated with a variety of our platforms and our our TMS and things like that. I can tell you, first of all, obviously, you know, super, wishful and thankful for everything we've done, but wishful for all additional products we'll build together. And I think that building with a company as big and, you know, I I'll say it, like, as complex as WallPay has also taught us a lot about how infrastructure of you know, the real payments world works at scale. And, obviously, this is this is not a game for for small startups that, you know, decide they wanna wake up in the morning and move trillions. It's it's really a lot of infrastructure, that needs to move this, and this is why we're so happy to work with you. Nabil Manji, thank you so much. We'll see you again probably in one of our next, broadcast as you're probably one of our most favorite characters of this space. Thank you, Nabil. Thanks, Goldie. Yellowcard, if you haven't heard of them by now, then you're probably hiding under a rock. But Yellowcard is probably the first licensed stablecoin company in Africa. It serves more than 20 different countries in that region alone and has processed more than $6,000,000,000. We have no no other than Chris Maurice, the cofounder of Yellowcard here with us. Chris, thank you so much for joining. I wouldn't miss it for the world, brother. Thank you. Thank you. You know, the story of Yellowcard is such an interesting story. We could probably have a long form podcast of an hour just talking about that story and have entrepreneurs worship you and your cofounder, Justin, later. But maybe just quickly, how long has Yellow Car been around? What does it do? And really briefly, what do you guys, I guess, really solve for your clients in terms of pain points? Yes. Well, you know, look, you know, the the company started back in 2018. Right? I met a Nigerian guy on the Internet that told me to do this, which is how most good companies start. That's the the rumor is that's how Fireblocks started as well. But A 100%. I was a prince. But yeah. I, you know, we we got started, back in 2018, launched in 2019, and, I think COVID counts as twelve years, which makes it almost twenty years now that we've been operating. And, yeah, you know, basically, what we do is, we work with, you know, banks, businesses of all shapes and sizes. Right? You know, the Visas, the Paypals, the Fireblocks of the world, to use stablecoins to help facilitate international payments, manage treasury, and just access the dollar. Right? So, you know, we're the the largest licensed stablecoin payments infrastructure provider for Africa and the broader emerging world, work with, you know, again, banks and businesses across these markets, across markets where you can't just walk into a bank and make an international payment. Right? Either because of illiquidity on the dollar or disconnectivity from SWIFT and the broader correspondent banking system. So, yeah, using using this technology to, you know, really change the way that payments work in parts of the world where, you know, payments didn't work yesterday. That that's I think that's what a lot of people are thinking when they're hearing yellow card or thinking, okay. These guys, have been there, you know, probably since day one of digital asset economy. And those are the use cases that I thought they're powering, but I wanna see how that works. Right? In this series, I just don't wanna talk about, you know, stablecoins. They're great. They're transparent. They're faster. I think everyone knows this by now. Right? This is why they're here probably. But I wanna show people I want, you know, with your help probably, what is yellow card? How does it really look like? What is the user experience? I'm now a business that wanna come in. I think the best example for this, and, obviously, you know, I know your amazing products very intimately, is the treasury portal. Right? That, I think, is my favorite part. I know that you have some some slides worked out for us. If you don't mind sharing that and take us through that, that would be great. Amazing. Gladly. Yes. We have a, somewhat limited presentation here, but, happy to happy to walk through it, and talk about it a little bit. Can you see my screen? Yeah. Perfect. Beautiful. Let's see. Cool. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, look. Essentially essentially, what the treasury portal is designed to do is provide a platform for businesses that, you know, again, to your point, have heard about this technology, have come to understand what this technology can provide to them. Because, you know, look. What I like to tell everybody is that businesses either have a stablecoin plan, are desperately trying to make a stablecoin plan, or lying about both of the above. Right? And so, you know, for the businesses that have come to realize what this technology is doing and what this technology means for their business and and, you know, for the the broader payments industry, you know, this is a practical way for them to actually be able to get started and and get involved. And so, you know, essentially, what this does is it streamlines for those companies those payments using stablecoins. Right? Everybody talks about the benefits of stablecoins and what stablecoins can do and and, you know, the payments and all that. But, you know, again, to your point, you know, what matters is the the practicality. Right? How does a stable coin actually replace swift, actually replace correspondent banking in practice for a business, for a bank, you know, somewhere on the African Continent, somewhere in Southeast Asia that needs to be able to facilitate these payments. How do they actually integrate that into their flows? And so, you know, that's what our infrastructure is designed to do, and and, you know, that's specifically what the treasury portal does. Right? It's for these businesses that have large scale treasury needs that need to move money around the world. Right? Need to move money around various emerging markets, move that money back to dollars, make payments to to China, to India, to, you know, all these other parts of the world. How do they do that in practice? And so, you know, that's that's essentially what we built here. What happens at this portal? When I'm your client, I get access to this. I guess this is my account. Right? I'm pretending like I haven't seen this a 100 times. Right? So yes. So, you know, look, all you're gonna do from, from here, right, you'll see those four options top right, top up, withdraw, pay in, pay up. So this this is designed specifically for large scale multinational companies. Right? So this is for, you know, the companies that need to make large payments between their, how do you say, between entities, move money back to dollars, move money to pound, euro, you know, all those other currencies, and then need to make invoice payments. Right? So need to pay an invoice in China. I need to pay an invoice in India. And so you're gonna load this in whatever currency you have. Right? Whether it's, you know, a local currency on the African Continent, whether it's, you know, peso, shilling, rand, whatever you have, you're gonna load it up. And then now you have that USD balance. Right? Everything is converted into US dollar stablecoins. You have that USD balance sitting there, that big beautiful USD balance, and then you can pay that out to wherever you need. Right? Pay out stablecoins, pay it out in dollar, pay it out in euro. Right? Pay it out in, you know, whatever currency you need, Any of the, you know, the 50 plus that we support around the world around the world. And so for me, basically, if I'm a if I'm a treasurer and and I assume that that's part of the the the clients that actually end up, you know, using this platform, I get my FX fee rates here. I get, obviously, the history of the transactions. I can because, again, I know this platform in and out, so you can actually, you know, download all your trades, do all your reconciliation and old settlement reports and everything. And, essentially, this is my new banking operating system. Right? Yeah. I mean, look. This this takes treasury management from, you know, having having to connect, I mean, banks around the world and having to deal with banks for these payments and and confirm things on either side. You this is essentially the how do you say it? Like, the the connectivity between all of that. Because a lot of people are you know? And now as the as more and more incumbents come in, obviously, the space is getting more regulated. There's a lot of concern about compliance. And especially in your region, there's a lot of, you know, questions of whatever platform are you using, how does that look in compliance? If you don't mind, maybe even just going back to the dashboard, like, what it you know, what do you guys integrate into this that allows me as a business to feel that, you know, I'm doing everything properly, ticking all the boxes? Well, Goldie, I'm glad you asked, brother. There's, you know, there's there's two big things that we're always concerned about, and that's compliance and security. Right? And, you know, both of them are built in natively. Right? On the security side, we built it in through Fireblocks, the most secure platform out there. Right? That's, so, you know, we Thank you for that call out. You know, we we built it in, you know, we built it in through Fireblocks. Right? So your your assets are safe, you know, backed by, I mean, you know, years of, you know, encryption and, you know, best practices in the industry. On the on the compliance side, everything is built in directly. Right? Whether it's AML, whether it's on chain, any of that. Right? You know, all the monitoring tools, everything like that is built in. You're able to continue to facilitate these transactions and know that we're protecting you from, you know, sending money to North Korea on accident. Right? And I think, again, this is becoming, obviously, a bigger and bigger concern as more of these incumbents come in. They wanna make sure they're doing the right thing even though it's a stable coins where a lot of people think this is unregulated. And people need to understand, yes, maybe crypto is unregulated in some places. But if you're a payments company like Yellowcard, you don't really have a choice. It's either you do things the right way, you or you get booted out of all these countries. So so, Chris, really, thank you for this. I I guess another question is, you know, other than than us taking over, you know, the security aspect of this, what parts of of Yellowcard did you actually ended up building on top of Fireblocks? What helped you get to the scale? I mean, look. The, you know, the infrastructure itself is built on Fireblocks. Right? I think that, you know, when it comes to, when it comes to digital assets, right, you know, having, secure and also user friendly infrastructure is extremely important. Right? And look. I'll tell you something, Goldie, that usually gets me in a lot of trouble at crypto conferences, which is that, you know, self custody kinda sucks. Right? Like, the the user experience the native user experience of crypto is not great. Right? I mean, you know, I send money to strings of 27 characters of various different, you know, letters and numbers and this and that. And if I screw up one letter, then my money is gone forever, and there's nothing I can do about it. Right? Like, that's not a great user experience. And I think that it's very easy for, you know, people like us in the industry to kind of be blinded by, you know, experience and and all of that and and, you know, think that this stuff is easier to use than it's not. You know, this technology is still very scary for, you know, a treasurer that has been, you know, just handling, you know, basic money movements in banks their whole lives to suddenly start adopting. And so, you know, building it on an infrastructure that can provide familiarity, right, that can provide, you know, the things that people are used to. Right? You know, multisignature authentication. Right? Whitelisting of accounts and wallets and and all of that. Right? You know, all of the the various tools and everything that, you know, Fireblocks provides in its infrastructure is extremely important. Right? And it's especially important for the companies that are not native to this industry. Right? And, you know, look. I mean, we are native to this industry, and it's important for us. Right? I mean, you know, again, like, no matter how experienced you are, I mean, all of us, if you've been in the space long enough, have sent money to the wrong address at some point, and it sucks. Sure. Right? Sure. It's a terrible it's just it's terrible. And so, you know, I think I think that's, you know, a big part of, you know, again, how we're able to make the user experience on our side so simple, so straightforward for these businesses is because we have a good foundation that it's built on top of. Perfect. Thank you for that. And, obviously, we're very honored to to be powering you guys, you know, one of the most amazing businesses definitely in the continent and I think generally in the crypto space. I know that you guys, you know, have done some really interesting partnerships with Visa, with PayPal, working in, you know, more than 20 countries probably puts a lot on your road map. What's, like, the biggest thing you're super focused on right now and very excited about at least for, you know, the next year? Well, Goldie, you failed to mention the biggest and most important partnership that we've entered into, which is the Fireblocks network itself. That's, you left that one off of the map there. You're an important part of that network. You know, look. I think, I think, you know, for us, it is it, you know, it really comes down to continuing to grow, right, and and continuing to expand. I think, you know, we want to be we wanna be all over the world providing, you know, this technology and providing access to this technology, providing a better way for businesses to interact with this technology in the parts of the world where, you know, again, Swift and the correspondence system don't work today. I think that, you know, in this industry, you know, look, not to say that, you know, there shouldn't be companies in The US doing this stuff. But, you know, I think that there's so much focus in the industry on, like, The US and Europe and and, you know, these parts of the world. And and, you know, the reality is and, you know, look, I'm just I'm I am checking all the boxes that usually get me in trouble at crypto conferences here. But I've sent money from The US to Europe before. It's not actually that bad. Like, it works kind of fine. And so, you know, I think all this focus on, you know, how do stable coins, you know, make for better money movement within The US and within Europe and and parts of the world like that is it's it's, you know, misguided. Right? Because this technology has so much to offer of across emerging and frontier markets. And, you know, for us, that's the goal. Right? We wanna continue to provide a better way for these businesses to be able to operate in markets around the world where Swift and the correspondent banking system as it works today are not an a a legitimate alternative. Right, where those systems don't work and those systems don't compete with, you know, what we're doing and and, you know, what this technology is providing. And and I think you guys are a great example of a company that's not just talking to talk about walking the walk. Chris Marais from Yellowcard, thank you so much, and thank you folks. We'll see you in the next session of our product focus and stable coins. Thank you so much. Wow. That was a great session. And I wanna thank, first of all, the four amazing guests that were with us today. Ben, Andre, Chris, Nabil, thank you so much for coming online and sharing what's really happening, how your products really look like, and how Fireblocks has helped you build those. And, again, for everyone that's watching, I think we've made it really clear. These are not POCs. These are not just pilots who may never see the light of day. These are real products in production that have moved billions of dollars over the past several years. We've seen how Bridge have built the stablecoin platform for businesses, how WallPay is actually doing merchant settlement, and how we're now doing payouts with Stablecoins. We've seen how Yellowcard is doing treasury management with their treasury portal in Africa, and how Conduit is doing cross border payments for b two b. All fantastic products. And, again, the trends line up. If you haven't read our state of stablecoins report, you should look into it because it's packed with tons of insights on how payment companies and leaders around the world are thinking about this shift right now. What they are adopting it, why, how, what are they doing, what's working, and what's next. I really like how Chris put it. We're not just building for early adopters anymore. We're building for the future of payments in every market we touch. And I think that's really what's important. I think we've crossed the chasm. Right? And this is about creating meaningful value for merchants, for platforms, for businesses globally. And, again, as I said in the beginning, stablecoins are not the cure for everything. They won't solve every payment problem you have. But if you're trying to move money globally, if you're trying to do that with more speed and more control and probably more transparency and predictability, then, yes, they're absolutely needed in your business. And, yes, they're already being used. You are not our guinea pig of this technology. You should be adopting it. So if you are a business, if you are a merchant, please go ahead and talk to one of those four amazing guests that we had here or with their respective companies. And if you're a payments company that's now building their infrastructure, come talk to us at Fireblocks. No matter where you are in your stablecoin journey, we're here, and we're happy to help you build the future of this economy. So thank you all again, and we look forward to seeing you on our next webinar.