How Squads Secured $15B in Assets on Solana with Stepan Simkin and Garrett Harper

Transcript

how you want to make that stable coin productive, right? Beyond just essentially using it for, you know, truffling capital around and sending it from one address to another. Um, is yield a component of that? Like what kind of yield? And >> it's hard if you're a company coming in the space and you're trying to say, would we put our customer deposits into stable coins if you can't trust it and think it's secure and it's easy to manage. >> Are you guys primarily focused on trying to win some of these stable coin deals like Western Union when these guys come online? They're going to be using Salana. They haven't gone and, you know, deployed somewhere else first. Welcome back to the rule. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread

[music] the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. >> Sit back, relax, and enjoy it. [music] >> [music] >> Stefan Garrett, guys, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. It's uh it's an absolute pleasure to uh chat about the world of stable coins with you guys. Glad we made it happen. Uh guys, you recently got some uh some love from Anatoli. Uh personally, that's how I I found out about you guys. Uh Anatoli was shouting you guys out as part of the stablecoin world on Salana.

uh the very following week. We saw Western Union announced that they're launching a stable coin on Salana. And so that's uh part of what I wanted to talk to you guys about. Uh before we do, it's both of your first times on the show. I think that calls for a couple of intros. We'll keep it brief and concise, but uh who is Stefan? Who is Garrett? And uh generally, how did you guys end up here building squads? >> Um so I'm Stefan. I'm co-founder and CEO at at Squads. About four years ago, I really got into Salana with uh my very best friend. We met our third co-founder and decided to build the most secure and resilient stable coin infrastructure for the ecosystem and been doing that for the last four years now.

And yeah, I'm Garrett. I do partnerships and comms at squads. I was at Blockworks before this. I did Lightseed the Salana podcast with Mert from Helas. So, uh I got him famous and I hired him. So, that's why he is where he is today. >> Wow, that is an epic mer shout out. You literally built the guy from scratch. He couldn't have done it without you. Garrett, any any just before we get into stable coins, any comment on the most recent uh happenings at Block Works, the transformation from a a media company to a data company? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously from the outside looking in. I think it's uh it makes sense that they're focusing on data and research. They also killed at that. They have a really good team. I mean, they had an awesome news team. I was really close with a lot of those uh

guys and girls. So, it's sad to see that happen. I know they're going to end up in good places, though. Um, Blockwork Works has two killer founders. I think they're going to do really good. Um, the most impressive thing for me with them is that over time that they've just been like kind of slow and steady and you've seen a lot of news groups and different companies kind of fall off as you go through the cycles because sometimes they go too risk, etc. And I think Block Works has done it right and that they were bootstrapped and then they didn't raise money until about four years in and I think it's playing out for them really well. So, yeah, I it's really sad to see everybody have to get laid off. Um, but like I said, I think everyone's going to end up in a good place and I've

already seen a lot of Salana teams reach out. So, if you're looking to get into comms or marketing on this end, there's going to be a lot of job openings. >> Very cool. Yeah, it's funny to think about a news company or a media company going risk on, but I think that is what we see. We see teams get tribalistic. We see them go all in, uh, with some of their reporting and take take leaps and bounds. And so, uh, us at the rollup, we've been doing this for going on six years now. Started in DeFi summer 2020. And it's just legitimacy. We try to keep an educational framing to all of this and just help bring uh trual knowledge. One to help us, right? So that we can make good decisions as as personal capital allocators, but then also everyone watching can also make good

decisions as well now that they're well informed. Guys, again, thank you so much for coming on and for being here. Um I I' I'd love to hear a little bit more about squads and then I do want to get into a sense of how you're seeing the stablecoin landscape playing out on Salana generally. Um so Stefan maybe you can start tell us you know what has it been like your founder journey coming on starting squads and then generally why did you decide to build this protocol on Salana? >> Yeah so it it basically is a journey of uh of four years. Originally we started focusing on governance infrastructure and then pretty quickly figured out that we want to focus on multisc is the core component and then somewhere along the way we figured out that multisc is just

one way to configure a smart account and today we're the biggest smart account infrastructure provider um for Salana and SVM and it was a very kind of natural progression together with the ecosystem we you know in the moment in time we we were what the ecosystem needed us to be the most and you know in the when when FTX happened for example multisig and self custody for larger teams and uh valuable chain assets particularly within Salana ecosystem became paramount and so that also accelerated that growth in that moment in time and as we have been growing together with our customers and and sort of Salana teams and larger protocols we saw them um rely on stable coins more and more right and use the multic infrastructure um to run payroll to pay contributors to essentially run their

businesses um entirely on chain with stable coins and so we also had to evolve together with them and and bringing in you know more products and services that really allow you to go fully on chain stable coins as a business and now we also have a consumer touchpoint with our fuse wallet and we also have now a developer product that makes it easy for other builders to come in and build um similar financial applications on top of the infrastructure we've been developing for the last couple years. >> And did you start relatively general and then you sort of uh dialed in honed in on stable coins as the primary driver of what you can use its infrastructure for?

How did you start from kind of a general smart contract platform and then end up taking taking the leap and taking the dive into stable coins? What was the rationale behind the decision-making process? >> I think it's um it's seeing how uh your customers actually interact with your product, right? And where they find most value. Um I think the way we think about like our business generally is the there's the infrastructure layer which is squad protocol. It's really good at bringing in capital and assets into um into the ecosystem of squads because it's very secure, it's very reliable and um it's it's now a very trusted sort of Lindy layer for securing assets within sort of the the SVM world. And then we have this kind of second layer on top of

the protocol which is the productivity layer, right? Like it's it's apps and products and services that allow us to help make that capital productive, right? And so um we saw that most of our customers were um starting to rely on stable coins as as essentially the core infrastructure to run their their business. And it became very clear to us that this is where things are going and we actually kind of got you know that sense before there was this sort of stable coin many and everybody was talking about them because we actually saw that happen you know on our platform right we saw our customers do that and so that was really the main driver is just like talking to our customers and talking to our users right and and figuring out that this is where the world is going and then um really um

kind of focusing heavily on on bringing uh more stable coin focused products that allow you to run your financial operations on chain uh to market. And so that was kind of the journey for the last year and a half. >> Very cool. And uh this is this is certainly something that is continuing to accelerate. You guys saw it early and now uh Western Union has announced that they're going to be launching a stable coin. This was man, this was like the last hold out. This was like the last person that was like, you know, in their horse and buggy when the car came out. They were like, "NO, LIKE DON'T TAKE away my horse and buggy. Cars are, you know, they're they're not going to work." man, Western Union launching a stable coin and they decided to do it on Salana. There's rumors that, you know,

Salana might have paid for some sort of exclusivity arrangement. Can I just get a general reaction to what it's like that now Western Union has said that they're going to launch a stable coin and they're going to do it on Salana. What is your reaction to this news? I I think Salana has an amazing team and uh they're working really hard to make the you know the fintech world and the payments world um outside of crypto aware of the amazing technology stack that's been built in the last four five years I think at this point and um I think Western Union is just you know it's a major it's a great milestone right for for the team at Salana and for the ecosystem broadly but um you know job is not finished there's there's so many companies that are just thinking about their stable coin strategies and

um there's so much ground to cover and there's so um like Western Union type caliber um uh partners to acquire and so I would say Western Union is fantastic. I think the the rumors are incredibly silly. And I think um you know a large incumbent player recognizing Salana for its um for its technology is uh is actually very rational and makes a ton of sense. Um and I think we're going to see a lot more of those in the coming months and years. >> Cool. Garrett, question for you. um what is it like to acquire uh one of these stable coin partners? Um are you guys working with Western Union? If so, how were you able to land that? If not, what are some of the other stable coins that you're targeting to ultimately acquire uh as part of the squad's partner

network? >> Yeah, I mean, we want to be involved with as many stable coins as possible. I'll say that just and kind of bouncing off what Son said, I think it's it's really great even from a brand awareness standpoint. I was just at Money2020. a lot of the people there heard about the news and started asking around and then you start hearing Salana more and more whereas like the first two two days or first day of the conference you didn't hear that at all. Um so it's a big change there. Uh I will say one thing that's unique about maybe the Salana ecosystem and I think squads in particular that really stood out to me when I got here is that was you know after FTX and everything happened is that you have people here that continue to build and try to make great products

no matter what's kind of happening on the outside partnership side. I think it is nice from a momentum standpoint and also brand awareness, but like where you stood here, we're just going to build great products and no matter who um comes on through partnerships. Uh we know in the long run if you build great products, everybody's going to come to you. So um if you bring in the users, then the supply side, which to me are the stable coin partners, they'll come and and that's our goal. >> Got it. And so speaking, you know, they it seems like everyone in their mother's a stablecoin issuer these days, right? So speaking to kind of that the group out there that is now getting into the game issuing stable coins, they're going and they're putting their their foot into this business. It feels like every bank uh every major institution if they

have some sort of financial capital at stake, they're going to be settling using stable coins. JP Morgan just announced uh something in this regard today. What do you say to these guys? You know, what is the conversation? Does it differ between enterprise and more cryptonative? uh like what is the elevator pitch for squads and why why a stable coin issuer should use squads? >> Um I think on the specifically on the issuer side and as you're the pitch we've been making for the last six months and we we can't kind of talk publicly about a lot of these conversations and and and things in the pipeline but there there's a lot more things coming. It's um we are pitching ourselves as a trusted partner to design your first your stable coin strategy, right? And how you think about um self-

custody, key management, stable coin accounts um what how you want to make that stable coin productive, right? Beyond just essentially using it for, you know, shuffling capital around and sending it from one address to another. Um is yield a component of that? Like what kind of yield? And so we really come in as this partner that can give you the infrastructure, can give you the um expertise packaged also in the form of our enterprise and developer offering grid uh which is you know set of simple APIs that unlock stable cocoin accounts cardians um uh plug into orchestration uh give you programmability and and onchain policies and so we are really that partner that helps you design the stable coin strategy and we're you know obviously vertically integrated with Salana. we're single chain uh because we think this is how we can deliver the most um um the best experience to to to

the customer, right? And so uh from that perspective, we are also very synergetic with the work uh being done at uh obviously by the Swana team. And so we work closely with them um on on sort of thinking through what is the right path for bringing in more fintex and large institutions and asset issuers onto into the ecosystem. Relay, low fees, lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at your [music] fingertips. Instant multi-chain payments. Choose any token on any chain. 75 plus network supported. More than 5 million users. 8 billion plus volume processed. 70 million plus transactions. Fast, reliable, everywhere. Start [music] swapping today. Only on Relay. Habachi.

Provable. Trade per with speed and security. Earn rewards. Visit [music] hibbachi.xyz. Trading on fire. The wait is over. The Talis [music] testnet is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. That that makes sense, right? And Solana's philosophy has always been vertically integrated. You know, before it was like modular versus monolithic. Generally, we've seen more and more applications platforms L1's take this approach. Hyperlid is going in this direction. It's this vertically integrated direction. Uh and and so we're seeing stable coin issuers also go in this direction. We're seeing the rise of stable chains, Circle, Arc, you know, we've got Tempo on the rise. Um another another acquisition was Mastercard that

acquired or is supposedly acquiring Zero, you know, for the settlement of these transactions and and specifically payments. So how do you see G given that you guys are focused on Salana, right? and and there's a very integrated vertically integrated approach there. I could you just unpack more about the rationale why does this give issuers a better experience than say launching their own stable chain. Um I think maybe Garrett can also speak to I think the benefit of existing in in internet inter capital markets but it's the idea that it's um it's a thriving uh open permissionless blockchain that has

DeFi activity that has you know intern capital markets activity that has a lot of asseters coming in uh to do things on that chain. And so existing in this open environment, this is where you can actually reap the most benefits of uh of an innovation mindset, right? And innovations from the open that come from the open system. Um and from a security and sort of reliability guarantees, uh we definitely believe that for um like when you have, you know, a bunch of corporate chains that sort of inter interface one with one another, um that is actually not um that is not not a viable foundation. having um having a secure base layer that actually gives you security guarantees, performance guarantees and has um you know a a massive community that hyper optimizes

for um performance and speed and security of the underlying blockchain is actually very important and we think it's uh you know it's a massive benefit and so when we are in those conversations with larger enterprises that are thinking about their stable coin strategies that's the argument we're always making and um so far it's been it's been pretty successful. >> Yeah. What I would add to that too is I think all these stable coin issuers that are trying to more or less I don't think there's going to be a thousand of them, right? I think there's probably going to be a handful that really succeed at this payment use case. There's going to be so many stable coins from the sense of like my platform. If I'm Starbucks, I might have stable coin uh Starbucks coin, you know, but I think we're only going to have like USDC, USDT, and these other

probably like five stable coins. They're going to want to be everywhere. It's a services business. But if you're picking a home, the thing with Salana is that it's been around for the last like five years. We do have a lot of payment chains coming out. um they have a lot of great features, but I would say at least 95% of that is covered by Salana today and it's live in production. I think that's another thing with squads is that we've been around since 2021 working in the stable coin and infrastructure and security space. So if you want to go somewhere today that has a whole DeFi ecosystem built out, you have experienced builders, you have the infrastructure in place, that's where Salana is. So I think you make that your home. But I think it's kind of silly to think that a stable coin is ever just

going to be on one chain in perpetuity if you want to be an ultimate like payment stable coin because you want to be everywhere. >> Right. Right. We had uh Jeremy Aair come on the show and he was describing this effect where think about Netflix. You can watch Netflix on your iPhone. You can watch Netflix on your laptop. You can watch it on your TV. You can watch it on an airplane. There's all these places. It becomes ubiquitous once you have the proliferation and the distribution of a stable coin on all the chains. And so could you could you separate out maybe what you know Garrett when when you say you you know you may have Starbucks coin but you may not have you only may have like four or five payment coins. Could you kind of just separate those two threads?

>> Yeah. I mean I think about it that like every big um company that has customer demand is going to want to have their own coin in some sense own stable coin and just the sense that they can make all the rewards earn the yield on that. So it's more of like loyalty points at the end of the day more or less. Um, but I only think when you're talking about international payments and payments in between companies, payments in between banks, there's only going to be a handful of stable coins that actually everyone's willing to accept and also has a really deep liquidity. Um, and so at that point, you know, you're not going to have 10,000 of those, the alphabet soup where there's so many different names of USDC or, you know, USD token. Um, so in my opinion, there's probably going to be like three to five

of those. But I think anybody that has a lot of customer demand is going to have essentially a checking and a savings account where if you have customer funds sitting in your ecosystem, like even Stripe, it's easy, right? Like they have so many balances in their ecosystem, they're going to have a stable coin so that they can get those rewards and also share it with their their customers. Whereas like if you're holding USDC, um typically you're not earning anything on that. But for payments, those type of stable coins make sense. >> Got it. And and how can they leverage squads in this example? Right. If there's a fragmentation problem and we've got thousands of stable coins in there and Starbucks has a stable coin and USDC exists and Chick-fil-A coin and all all these different things get even given that they're they're more of loyalty programs we're going to need to

clear between these stable coins somehow, right? How can they use squads to help accomplish and maybe fix some of this fragmentation issue? >> Yeah, it's a good question. Trick-off coin made me laugh, by the way. Um, [laughter] Steph, I can let I can let you take this, but I'll just give my like kind of high level thoughts. I mean, I think a lot of this is a liquidity issue, right? If you're going in and out of your own stable coin to one that you make payments with, that's a liquidity issue. That's not something that we naturally focus on, but what we do provide is the infrastructure that allows you to do this money movement in a secure way. Um, so that's kind of like the high level that I'll provide. Um, and Steph, I'll let you take it.

>> Yeah, I think we're not solving interoperability, right? like we're solving um secure reliable infrastructure that allows you to u deploy stable coin accounts for your own enterprise for your customers for um basically for for the whole ecosystem right and and designing stable coin strategy around money movement and stable coin accounts and so I think from from our perspective obviously we think that interperability particularly in the stable coin space is um is going to happen and there's going to be multiple chains right we're not thinking that salon is going to be the only chain to exist and u I think the the way we think about our infrastructure is that um it it gives you it allows you to maximize uh benefits that Solana can give you from a performance and and reliability perspective. Um and then obviously if you want to have your assets uh you know

on multiple chains then you're going to have to match the same functionality. Um but I think from a that's from like the infrastructure perspective, from a product perspective, you know, our focus is very much on bringing in net new um inflows into the stable coin space, right? Like we're we're not kind of thinking about how can we get supply like stable coin supply from chain X to Salana or you know the other way around. It's very much how can we how can we grow the stable coin supply, right? How can we create net new stable coin supply that comes in through you know different entry points that we create with our products and allow um you know to to get the efficiency gains of using stable coins over fiat money.

>> Yeah. Yeah, and I'd add that like it's hard if you're a company coming in the space and you're trying to say would we put our customer deposits into stable points if you can't trust it and think it's secure and it's easy to manage and those are basically all three things that we were trying to do constantly and we started that with crypto teams and now we're bringing that out to the traditional finance world >> right so help me rationalize this then there's uh you know 300 billion of stable coins now I think we all have heard you know secretary Besson and the projections of how much you know this could be in the scale 3.7 trillion by 2027, 2028. Um, and so if we're not too focused on, you know, trying to take the stable coins from other chains, that's where, you know, predominantly

most of the stable coins are are today, right? We've got, I'm looking at DeFi Lama here, 160 billion on ETH, uh 78 billion on Tron, 15 billion on Solana. So Salon is number three, but it's still it's still, you know, 10x away from from the the scale of stable coins on Ethereum. And so are you guys primarily focused on trying to win some of these stable coin deals like Western Union when these guys come online they're going to be using Salana they haven't gone and you know deployed somewhere else first or is is in an effort to grow the the supply of stable coins on Salana. It it still makes sense to try to sort of siphon off or vampire attack some of the stable coins from other

chains or or is that not the right way to think about it? Um I think Altitude our business account is a good example right so we announced uh just a month ago public launch of Altitude which is essentially gives you a business banking experience but purely on stable coins there's sort of no crypto knowledge required it's all um you know any kind of CFO or an operational person uh in in a traditional startup would be able to fully navigate it and and use it as as if it's their sort of traditional bank account but it's fully powered by stable coins and uh squads infrastructure and I think that's a good example where um it's much less interesting for us to go and and say well how can we get more uh of the stable coin supply from Ethereum rather than looking at uh you know a

massive market and saying can we allow um like you know a thousand 10,000 100,000 businesses to start essentially banking on stable coin rails using our products and our infrastructure and growing stable coin supply that way as opposed to trying to figure out like how can we do you know these kind of u zero sum games uh because we think that the it's a massive opportunity that you know somebody should do this and it's much more just engaging for us and and uh we think a long-term much better strategy to come in and into into market that doesn't have uh stable coin solutions at all and and help businesses manage their financial operations much more efficiently using this new technology as opposed to trying to go out there and and move some supply from you know Tron

or Ethereum. And so in in that regard, when you guys are having conversations with enterprises and they're looking at entering the stablecoin space, you you you guys come and you're like, "Hey, we can provide you the accounts. We can provide you the infrastructure to facilitate these stable coin transactions." Are the enterprises asking you or concerned at all about what chain they're being deployed on, or are they or are they not really that deep in the weeds? Like where h how involved are the enterprises? where do they end up in the stack or do they just kind of trust you guys to to handle a lot of the infrastructure?

>> I think it really depends on the on the use case, right? Because like one of the most popular use cases we're seeing and we're discussing right now with with a few customers is where you're a platform that um you know you have capital coming in and then you have to disperse it to either um you know consumers. It's like a you know payout platform for contractors or payroll. There's plenty of those where um it's there's a lot of demand on with those businesses to essentially verticalize um like a consumer bank within their own platform, right? So they can have floats stay in the system and so you have um you know um assets coming in and then you're able to disperse them using stable cocoins.

So stable coin wallets uh of essentially end uh recipients and then you as a platform uh that does the payouts fully control that flow end to end. Uh so from that perspective you're you're really agnostic to the chain itself like you're not um you know you don't have alignment to Ethereum or Tron or Salana. All you care about is can I deploy you know a million or two million accounts um for you know for reasonable price. Uh will you know this this whole infrastructure be secure? Um will it be self-custodial in some cases like that's starting to come up where if you want to scale your enterprise uh to markets where you you can't get licenses or you essentially want to arbitrage the fact that self- custody allows your users to have wallets and essentially control their own keys. Um so you care much more about

those questions much less about um you know what what chain you're you're building on um as long as you know the chain kind of passes a threshold of being sufficiently decentralized being performant being secure and giving you sort of the cost and efficiency guarantees that you require as a large enterprise making those choices. Um so yeah but I think that's much more important than kind of thinking about interop and and different chains. >> Cool. Makes sense. Um I mean it certainly worked out for you guys. you got 15 billion in uh in stable coins that you're helping to secure. Um could you describe what the what the makeup of that 15 billion is? Maybe just some some metrics if you if you know any off the top of your head. Generally, I'm just curious how much stable coins like how how what is the split maybe enterprise

to retail? Is it all USDC or USDT? Is there sort of a makeup uh demographic that way? Geographical regions generally where do you find the 15 billion coming from? So just to clarify 15 billion is total assets secured. So that includes assets other than stable coins. Stable coins is two billion and 100 million. And so that is made up mostly of USDC. So 1.3 billion is USDC and then the rest is split across USDT. Um that includes B and uh and some other stable coins that are coming to to Salana. Um I would say 90% of that is enterprises and then 10% of that is retail. Geography wise it's um I would say 50% um kind of US or around US like

the offshore ecosystem around US as well. So that includes BVI, Panama and essentially where a lot of the foundations reside. Um and then the rest is sort of split across uh we start to get more u demand from Latin America but then it's obviously Europe and parts of Asia. Um that is pretty evenly split in in the in the remaining 50%. >> Very cool. Blockchain shortcuts, templates and widgets launch without friction for builders by builders. Visit enso.build. [music] Asset management redefined. Built on ERC7621.

Standardize how you launch, manage, and trade onchain [music] baskets. This is Alvara, the standard for onchain asset management. >> Um you guys also have a partnership with Coinbase. All right. So, you're kind of like putting your tentacles out into some of these other ecosystems. Uh, h how has this partnership, it's been live for maybe two months or so, but you guys have, like you said, garnered over a billion dollars of USDC, and there's very tight relations between Circle and Coinbase. So, h how has this partnership helped or how how do you think it will help in the future to continue the growth?

Yes. So, the we're we're really happy to uh to be partners with with Coinbase. It's been it's been a few months already, and we have a couple features coming up that um make it much clearer what uh what this partnership is actually about. It spans like, for example, we also heavily use C, right, which um powers the Euro accounts in Altitude and gives you this full, you know, multiurrency experience at this point where you have a dollar account powered by USC, you have a Euro account powered by um your C. there's a lot of uh DeFi things that are coming up and integrations that will allow you to you know earn yield and and it will very you feel very much uh you know intuitive to any kind of traditional audience without really um um thinking too much about you know interacting with the blockchain and

um there's also some things that we're excited around uh CBPTC um which we think is is sort of the the best version of of Bitcoin um out there on Salana today and we have a few uh specifically Bitcoin or CBPC focused features coming up uh in the in the next few weeks. Um but I think from from our perspective we obviously are stable coin max and we would would love to have you know more stable coins out there but at the same time we also see that majority of our customers um do prefer to um to use USDC for payments like G was mentioning and I think there's kind of a lot of um there's kind of separation in in in in in customers minds where there's a payment stable coin and there's a stable coin that I I use to earn yield and I

think that also is important from a perspective of like if these are real businesses like accounting matters and having a single stable coin that's both used for payments and storing your essentially cash balance and also being your investment account or like your earn account doesn't always work uh for reporting requirements and so actually majority of the like accountants we we talked to and CFOs they actually prefer that those are two separate accounts and not you know a single checking savings account in one place um and so yeah I think so far we've been incredibly happy working with with Coinbase and actually you know the partnership with Coinbase doesn't entail any um kind of multi-chain aspect to it right it's like coin Coinbase is is very active in the law ecosystem and um we we kind of love to see them supporting DeFi in different ways and and as I mentioned with CBBC as

well. >> Very cool. Um guys man this has been an absolute pleasure. I don't have a ton ton more. I mean generally I think my my final question here is you know 15 billion and total assets secured. How do we how do we get this tound how do we get to trillions? Everyone's saying trillions. Let's get >> I'm gonna I'm gonna get my my quick viewpoint on this. Um, so we actually all get paid in USDC in stable coins at squads and we have like the whole time when I joined the company and actually like even though I was working in crypto before this like never got paid in USC, right? So it's funny I'm talking to people at foundations and different companies and they don't get paid in stable coins yet. They talk about it every day. So one I would say that squads is actually solving our own

problems and that we actually like run payroll through stable coins and now we actually have a business account so other people can do things like that. So, we had a problem. We were doing it in the tough way. Now, we actually solved our own problem. We were trying to expand that for others. But one thing I noticed was I got paid in stable wins. Initially, I was just offramping that to my traditional bank account. Um, because that's where my debit, my credit card is for all my bills are. Uh, but over time, I started seeing that I could earn like four or five% yield. And you start seeing those like payments come in each month. You're like, "Okay, this is kind of nice, you know, like maybe I'll let this balance grow a little bit." Then I'm somebody that likes to trade onchain assets. So, if I already have it in

USDC, it makes it super easy to do that trading, right? So, if you're somebody that doesn't do trading at all, I get it. Maybe you don't really care to get paid in USC, but for me, it's perfect. Now, with like our debit card, you can spend anywhere. Um, and those cards are only get better over time. Like right now in the US, they don't have points or most cards don't have points. If they do, it's like a token that might go to zero. Um, we don't have points, for example, but we will, and so will other people. And then you have like another reason to use your stable coins to spend. I think the more that you have to do on chain which is like one reason why I think salon is so great is sure you have stable coins but you also have like

internet capital markets in the sense that you can lend borrow trade and and every time that like stocks come on chain then it's available to everyone right like you can go to fuse our consumer app and the day that some project launch stocks you could start doing that on fuse the more that that gets built out the more reason you have to actually stay in those stable coins once you get paid in it um and that to me just over time I mean maybe there will be a step change moment where everyone goes into stable coins but I think it's once you start to see the benefits of it over time just like I kind of have getting paid in it. Slowly my balance has only gone up over time. I used to offer all of it and now I keep at least 50 70% on chain. So I think

it's less of a step function change unless there's some COVID type event that kind of you know QR codes came out of nowhere all of a sudden that could happen in the stable coin space as well. Um but I think stable coins with banks and tokenized deposits that could be part of it. But I think otherwise it's just really building really good products and that's what we're trying to do at squads because once you have the product and you're using it, you may not even care the stable coins are underneath it. But then you start seeing some benefits of it and your balance is just going to grow over time. >> Incredible. Yeah, I I that I think that's a great way to put it. And you describe the incremental changes these ultimately add up and compound uh once people do start to see that four or five

percent. That's a lot more than the 04 or 5% that they get on their savings account. Now, it's funny just quick story. I I was sitting in a room. It was at some crypto conference. There was maybe 50 of us. It was like this brunch event and there was a payment uh company that was like, "Hey, who gets who here? We all work at crypto companies, but who works who gets paid in stable coins?" Our company also pays our employees in stable coins. I was the only one out of like 50 people there that raised my hand. And then I had to explain how we did it. And it was, you know, back then it was like safe and I think we used request finance and we did all these things. And so you're you're absolutely right. I mean, one by one, all of these

companies are going to get onboarded. Those are little step functions in and of themselves, but over time ultimately these these do really grow and they do add to the stable coin balance. Look, 3.7 trillion by uh you know, two years from now, we're we're this is all incremental, but it's going to be a lot of step changes that get us there. Guys, thank you so much. Steon, I'll give you the last word. Anything to add after after Garrett's rant and my story? Thanks for having us. Uh, if you're a business, go sign up to Altitude. We would love to show you what it means to bank on Salana and use stable coins to run your financial operations. If you're an individual, Fuse Wallet is waiting for you. It's one click away. And we're always around if you have any feedback

or any if you want to learn more about stable coins or how you can use them in real life. Um, Bing, Garrett, or me in DMs. >> Love it. Thank you so much, guys. Absolute pleasure having you guys on. See you soon. And >> thanks, babe. We'll see you next time. Bye.