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4 Nov 2025 Cheeky Pint Stablecoin special: Zach Abrams (Bridge) and Henri Stern (Privy)

“They're maybe not happening for you yet in a big way, but they're happening at an industry level.” But I think people have a hard time visualizing because they say, “Well, I don't pay at the bar using stablecoins.”

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Speaker unverified
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Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
4 Nov 2025
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

Transcript context

…g, saw that same idea, saw that same opportunity and it was like, “Yes, this is the thing.” It obviously built something really good there. And so how do you describe what Bridge does today to people? We enable developers to build with stablecoins and it could be anything they want to build. So we help folks like SpaceX use stablecoins to move money across borders. We help folks like DollarApp build neobanks on top of stablecoins. We help folks like Felix Pago build cross-border payments experiences with stablecoins. We help treasurers rebalance their internal funds with stablecoins. Stablecoins are sort of this broad payment platform on top of which a bunch of new payment experiences can be built and we build APIs to let people use it. I want to come back to all those use cases, but maybe first to catch up. So how about Privy? Where in the crypto hype and then bust and then re-hype cycle did you guys start Privy? Peak hype. And so I had worked in crypto prior and I think I came out of that experience thinking this space is incredible. We have these rails that can be used to sort of codify ownership on the web in a way that hasn't been possible before. But also no one cares about building products that people actually want to use. And so this is an endless space where we'll work on protocols but never actually—no offense to protocols, which I think are deeply useful, but only if they got carried through all the way— You need the actual end customer use cases. And so I left and I think peak crypto brought me back. I was like, “I want to work on data tokenization,” which was the initial idea. A good place to do that was crypto. So our first version of it was, can we build data tokenization that would enable crypto companies to privately KYC people, which is a very 2021 idea of these private pools of liquidity that you need to be KYC for. Oh my gosh, I remember. That led us to wallets, which was really hard because people don't have the means of actually signing for things and most users don't want to get a wallet. And so we were like, we should solve that problem first, and then we can come back to it. And that's how we got to Privy. And so how do you describe to people what Privy does today? We build basically digital asset accounts. Wallets are the means of controlling crypto, stablecoins, any digital asset. And so we build APIs so developers can build basically digital asset accounts directly into their app rather than requiring a user to go outside the app to get an account. You can get it as part of your neobank payments platform, consumer app. And those are the people that we serve. But basically we give you the means of controlling assets in-app. Yes. So is it basically no one plans to be disrupted by stablecoins, funnily enough. And so if you're a remittance app, if you are a neobank, if you're any of these guys, you want to natively build digital asset functionality into your app and you guys provide the wallet infrastructure for them to do that? ittance app, if you are a neobank, if you're any of these guys, you want to natively build digital asset functionality into your app and you guys provide the wallet infrastructure for them to do that? Exactly. And I think the goal is to say you shouldn't need a PhD or deep interest in self-sovereignty in order to want to engage in this space. You should be able to do it as easily as you do anything else on the web. And we make that possible. When I talk to business people who are not in stablecoins and especially maybe people who are in fintech but not in stablecoins, they say, “I'm sure hearing a lot about stablecoins, but it doesn't seem like they're actually happening yet in a real way.” And obviously the Stripe/Bridge/Privy house view informed by all the data we're seeing in our customer usage is like, “No, they're happening. They're maybe not happening for you yet in a big way, but they're happening at an industry level.” But I think people have a hard time visualizing because they say, “Well, I don't pay at the bar using stablecoins. I am, myself, not paying day-to-day, therefore I just don't see it.” Maybe you guys can level-set for people, what's actually working because consumer retail payments in the US are not the hotbed of stablecoin innovation. Just where is the stablecoin stuff happening today? The first use case was predominantly cross-border payments. Okay, so cross-border payments, dollar balances, dollar holdings for people in emerging markets. Anything else? After that we've seen… So, SpaceX came to us, they're selling Starlink all over the world and so as a result they're collecting local— people are paying for Starlink in many dozens of different countries with their cards. So they're getting local currencies in all these countries and they need to repatriate all those funds because they fund their business out of the US. So they started using us to bring currencies back to the US. So they would take money out of a bunch of different countries in Africa and LATAM and send it to the US via stablecoins. How do they do the initial conversion from Rwandan local currency, or bolívars or what have you, to US dollars? So we do that for them, but the way that we do that is that in almost all these markets now, there are very robust FX markets effectively that exist between a stablecoin like USDC or USDT and the local currency. And this was the last, with each one of these crypto cycles, more of the infrastructure gets built that enables the next thing. And in the last crypto cycle, the big thing that happened was that all these local exchanges started. So you had local exchanges in LATAM and Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines all begin to get scale and those exchanges are dominated by stablecoin volume and they've effectively just become alternative FX markets. What's the remaining gap? The biggest gap between marketing and the reality of, “This is doable today.” s are dominated by stablecoin volume and they've effectively just become alternative FX markets. What's the remaining gap? The biggest gap between marketing and the reality of, “This is doable today.” I would say that the biggest thing that we see in the market is that these FX markets, so converting between Mexican peso and USDC or Mexican peso and dollar, some of these fiat markets are phenomenally deep and phenomenally efficient. So someone could send a hundred million dollars to Mexico and convert it into pesos without moving the market, but the stablecoin market is not as deep, so it's hyper-efficient. The interesting dynamic at play is that in the fiat FX markets, as you get bigger, your pricing comes down. In the crypto markets, as you get bigger, your pricing goes up because the spreads widen. So the market is way more efficient for startups. I see. Over time, the markets get deeper and deeper and so those startups are scaling and scaling and scaling. We see that with Felix Pago and others. I think what you're highlighting with the FX dynamic is underappreciated in crypto being a platform on which—it's like a shelling point for everyone to come together to create better things. And so we now have just more efficient ways to convert bolívars to US dollars than we had before. It's not particularly crypto native, that particular leg, but crypto is load bearing in bringing everyone together. That's kind of what we see, I think, in our market, which is to say my analogy is stablecoins. It's a very self-serving software to hardware analogy, but stablecoins are like Starlink for money where you need the ground stations to beam the pipes up from coax or fiber onto a line of sight like zero gravity, like space. Once it's in zero gravity, it's super efficient to actually move the data around and move the money around. But the ground stations on the ground have to be built. And at least where we take care of the market is mostly after you guys have done the really hard work of converting fiat to crypto, then the question is what can you actually do with the crypto? And that's where, obviously wallets, and those are the powers that people will come to us for. That analogy may be deeper than you think because do you know in the Starlink network where they started with more grand stations and then over time they're enabling more satellite to satellite connectivity to reduce the need for grand stations? And so it could be a pretty deep analogy. Okay, same question to you Henri: what are people actually using stablecoins for?…

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