John Collison: prediction

Transcript context

…My sense is that Stripe strategy in the long-run is to figure out how to transcend the constraints of traditional money movement. How much do you participate in the traditional financial institutions that have been set up and how much do you transcend that and build something novel? I think a lot of what actually Stripe is doing with building its own payments network, somehow building its own deposits network, which I think you still need to partner with banking institutions on to do that, so you’re still anchored with that, but I think that’s actually where stablecoins becomes quite interesting because it’s permissionless. And so, who does Stripe need to—I think the way that I would kind of think about it is who does Stripe need to get permission from today in order to exist in the way that Stripe wants to exist? Yeah. I think the thing that we think is interesting about financial infrastructure is it’s, by its nature, multiplayer. You look at old ecommerce systems and ones that even might’ve been on-prem or just the software is very outdated, and Shopify came along and built an amazing product and said, “Here’s a much better rate to manage your ecommerce store and manage your inventory and build a nice storefront and everything.” And they were able to really clean up a significant part of that market because you could replace your old ecommerce system with Shopify. What’s interesting about what we’re doing is payments—and to a large degree financial services—are by their nature multiplayer where every payment is with some counterparty. And even if it’s not, if it’s something like where do you store your money or how do you do AP or something like that. There are lots of banks out there that people have their deposits with or people wave their hands and say, “Oh, crypto will obviate this. ” But when people have money in crypto, they will store it in Coinbase, or in Binance, or what have you. And so our view is that for whatever job is being done, there will be a whole bunch of other counterparties that we are going to integrate with and work with. Totally. But there are players that Stripe will just be deeply competitive with who will not want to play on your sports team. I think there’s a difference between who do you partner with and who do you generally have to run through in order to be able to build a better version of financial infrastructure that is open, does actually move on modern rails, is actually ultimately net better for everyone, is not incentivized by value-capture. But I think there’s a lot of sense of how can you get more of the ecosystem cheering you on. It’s the transcendence from Stripe as the upstart startup to Stripe as the champion that’s pulling everyone into the future.…

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