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Speaker unverified: belief

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

“I think you're going to see that while fiat US dollars are X percent of the global market, stablecoin US dollars are going to be way more forever. But I do think we, and I hope we get to local stablecoins being 15, 20% of the market because you need them transactionally in all these markets and you want to have alternative FX markets and you want people to be able to store in local currencies.”

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

Transcript context

…e 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? For us, a lot of it is basically once wallets as the account system, or kind of like the control plane, once you have the stablecoin, what can you do with it? And so I think the majority of what people use us for is one, specifically the holding. I want to hold these assets and I want to put these assets to work. So it's opening up credit markets and yield generally for people who otherwise didn't have access before. And one of the things that's shocking about USDT, is that USDT is like a Zero100 hedge fund. They keep all of the carry for you, which speaks to how much people want stable currency across the world. And then the other thing that we're seeing, to your point about startups, is kind of the emergence of fintech super apps. A lot of early stage companies that now have the actual stack to build everything that has taken the neobanks of the world—the Revoluts, the Klarnas—decades to build, they can do in a year because everything's ready for them here. So those are the two types of use cases, which is I want to build bank accounts that are fully global that work for any consumer once they can get their hands on crypto. And then I want to make sure that these assets are put to work either through traditional markets or by actually investing in other assets. Yeah. One of the things I'm most optimistic about is, like the financial world before, if you wanted to expand into a bunch of different countries, you had to uniquely build your US infrastructure, uniquely build your European infrastructure, uniquely build your Mexican infrastructure. And the next company that came around had to do the same thing and then the next company around had to come and do the same thing. And now what's possible is you have a wallet and one person just needs to build a US dollar stablecoin and then you throw it into the wallet and now you have a US balance and then someone else in the world needs to build a naira stablecoin and now you have naira, someone else in the world, JPY stablecoin. Now you have— Yes. Previously it was N squared and now it’s just N. Yeah, exactly. You kind of open source your financial stack and it's like very early days in this and to get here, we need local stablecoins and right now stablecoins are dominated by US dollars. But you open source your financial stack and the companies that we're building on top of this are behind today, but basically making a bet that the cumulative power of all the builders in the world is going to create a better application over N years. Why have the local stablecoins been so slow? Because US dollars are not that big a share of global currency balances, but US dollars are 95 plus percent of stablecoin balances. What's going on with the euros and the Canadian dollars and the Swiss francs? S dollars are not that big a share of global currency balances, but US dollars are 95 plus percent of stablecoin balances. What's going on with the euros and the Canadian dollars and the Swiss francs? My theory is that this is revealed preference. US dollars are not that big a share for physical reasons. Whereas the true preference, if you go to a country that—I can think of many—and you have a crisp hundred dollar bill, that's worth a lot more than any other currency. I've traveled to places where I’ve had euros and dollars and people are like, “No, give me the dollars first.” So I believe you in the emerging market context, where clearly if you're in Turkey and you can hold Turkish lira or US dollars, that's not even really a contest. As a European, I'm not that unhappy holding euros. I'm not that concerned about it. And so euro stablecoins, Swiss franc, stablecoins, just other major markets, stablecoins should be a lot bigger. This is where, I mean I don't know, the two dichotomies to me are like, US versus global and then it's like B2B versus B2C. I think the majority of the stablecoin market today is B2B and that'll change. But the reality is basically where it is B2C, it's emerging markets, hence the US dollar preference and where it's B2B, it's American companies, hence the US dollar preference. So supposedly they'll even out over time, but at least for now it seems to be a revealed preference that dollars are— I think that's probably true. I think that the majority of the two main use cases for stablecoins or the main use case for stablecoins for many years was trading. And that market, everything is just quoted in dollars and there's a real network effect. So as more and more liquidity was built around a few dollars, that makes sense. I think over time you will see more of these stablecoins, but ultimately those same network effects are going to, I think, perpetuate. I think you're going to see that while fiat US dollars are X percent of the global market, stablecoin US dollars are going to be way more forever. But I do think we, and I hope we get to local stablecoins being 15, 20% of the market because you need them transactionally in all these markets and you want to have alternative FX markets and you want people to be able to store in local currencies. I think that's going to create much better experiences, but we're not there yet. And to your point, just about the history of this, Tether got started as a deposit asset for trading. You didn't want to basically have to trade out back to dollars. You didn't want to hold your position overnight so you would move into a stablecoin— And they couldn't get dollars— t asset for trading. You didn't want to basically have to trade out back to dollars. You didn't want to hold your position overnight so you would move into a stablecoin— And they couldn't get dollars— Exactly. But I think it's a 24/7 currency. You don't have to wait to move. So I think, why should you care if you're working on a business today that broadly handles money, but it's like my money works fine. I think the UX is going to be much better for consumers to actually have an always on money rail. Beyond that, there's a reality which is you get to have a relationship with your user that's much longer lasting. Ostensibly Uber's done this where Uber drivers get financing for their cars via Uber, but now any company can really do this where instead of paying out and then the relationship ends because the bank now owns the user, they can maintain a relationship with the user via these accounts that they enable. So every company ostensibly has a neo-banking arm that they can build into this to create a much tighter loop of benefits to their constituency. But what's the long-term equilibrium here? Because presumably consumers don't want their money spread out across 15 different services they interact with. Or do they? I mean, credit card chopping, such as I see it on Reddit sub threads, would say that maybe they do. But I think this is the entire point and where at least Privy gets dinged a lot with embedded wallets is it used to be the wallet was the users and you would carry it with yourself from app to app to app and you had a single point where you held everything. And that's great for centralization of these controls. It's really bad for UX because it means you're running third party software on every site you go to. We've enabled an inversion of that, whereby the app can serve their own self-custodial wallets as part of the app experience, but it creates this fragmentation. And at least to me, this is the real opportunity for building these money networks, where if you can help users make sense of that fragmentation where even though you have your assets in 15 different apps, each app on your phone is a bank, you have some control plane where you can manage those assets between all of them. I see. It's not that fragmented if it's programmable. That's the hope. Yeah. I think that this question is overwhelmingly going to be dictated by regulatory requirements. I think in a free market, then we would resolve to 90% US dollars or something. Is MiCA good, bad, fine? I would say it seems to be fine, but it could be bad. And I think the thing with all of these regulatory requirements is that they're sort of untested. And so what's basically happening is there's a few folks who are compliant in Europe and they're stretching it to the regulatory requirements to meet their specific needs and then over time, they're going to clamp down and what it looks like to be compliant in Europe will probably be different, very different in five years versus today. Oh, interesting. So you were saying we haven't seen MiCA enforcement yet and that will inform people's views of MiCA.…

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