How Stablecoin Growth Is Setting The Stage For An Explosive Bull Market

Transcript

With Tempo, you can just generate uh as many addresses as you want that all settle to a single wallet and then you don't have to do any of that additional accounting and sweeping. >> Welcome to the rollup. Our mission is to educate, empower, enrich so that you can be more bullish. Like, comment, subscribe, and enjoy the show. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the rollup. Here special episode we are coming at you. We're gonna bring on Dan Romero to talk about stable coins at scale. Dan is the head of go to market at Tempo. I'm sure you guys are very familiar with Tempo, obviously out of Stripe. Uh but Dan in particular co-founded Farcaster.

He was an early Coinbase executive before joining Tempo in February. And he calls stable coins a generational opportunity. We certainly agree with that. So we're going to bring up Dan to talk about Tempo. The layer 1 built specifically for stable coin payments. again incubated by Stripe and Paradigm raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation counts Mastercard, UBS and Koshi among its design partners with CLA planning to issue a stablecoin on the network. His public argument this year is that crypto has settled into a barbell. We've been talking about the barbell a lot on this show. uh and with speculation on one end and stable coin payments on the other and that payments companies want purpose-built chains rather than general purpose networks

competing with trading activity. Huge huge opportunities at stake here. Everyone's battling for stable coin dominance. Let's go ahead bring up Dan Romero and get into stable coins at scale. Dan, welcome to the show, man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. How you how you feeling uh given that we have a trillion dollar opportunity. And I believe Treasury Secretary Bessing calls it a $3 trillion opportunity and quite literally feels like a national economic priority uh in order to finance uh countries at large with the issuance of stable coins. It's a massive opportunity. So, how does it feel to work on this thing day in and day out?

>> I'm really excited. I've been in crypto for over a decade. Spent the first five years at Coinbase, spent five years on Farcaster. You might call that web 3. And uh the shift to stable coins has been frankly refreshing after uh struggling to figure out if if consumers are kind of interested in in web 3. I think we saw a lot of excitement around NFTTS for a bit and then that that kind of waned but stable coins have just been up and to the right over the last few years. Obviously Stripe bought bridge and then I think the the kind of marquee thing and the the real momentum started to really pick up after the Genius Act passed last year. And to your point, I think the US government is is leaning into stable coins and that is an opportunity for the country to have

global digital dollar dominance basically. And and I think you know people talk about reserve currency and all that kind of jazz. But the reality is a world where stable coins proliferate is very good for the US dollar because if you talk to enterprises around the world or or consumers, the the stable coin that they want to hold is a dollar denominated stable coin. Yeah, absolutely. And the dollar has been the global reserve asset as you mentioned. I mean, it's the primary export of the United States. So, it feels like it's critical infrastructure for the global economy. And now, to your point, we're modernizing that, upgrading it, so it's a digital dollar. Um, I mean, be before we get into some of the nuts and bolts around Tempo, what you guys have done in terms of the design choices that you've

made to make this primarily purpose-built for stable coins, I just want to just kind of stress test or pressure test the thesis, our stable coin thesis that we've been talking about on this show because you spent a lot of time thinking about stable coins. And what we've been talking about is how um, obviously the national economic priority thing, right, as they're kind of twisting the duration, you know, into the short end. But the idea is that, you know, there there needs to be a structurer buyer of short-term treasury bills and stable coin issuers can be that buyer. Do you truly believe that we're going to see stable coin issuing companies step up as one of the primary buyers of US treasuries in light of other sovereign nations moving away and repatriating their capital? Do you think

stable coin issuers can fill that void? Well, I don't know if it it it's just stable coin issuers filling the void, but I think if you step back, the fact that now you have a a kind of easily accessible digital dollar uh kind of on these globally, you know, available instant permissionless blockchains um I think is a really important step in terms of creating a kind of global consumer market for earn programs, right? So I think it started with DeFi and and kind of you know quote Dgens's uh playing around with memecoins but the same technology right the kind of morphos and a of the world are now able to provide kind of this foundational

infrastructure for enterprises that want to kind of say hey I'm I'm a global marketplace and I've got you know million contractors I I can now have an embedded stable coin wallet I can do my payments which were going out on fiat rails before in stable coins, so instant, global, cheap, and then have that wallet have an earn program that you can turn around and earn 4%, 5% anywhere in the world, right? So if you live in Argentina, your access to dollars is one thing, but getting access to dollars and then a a kind of solid think of it as like savings account effectively in terms of like the ability to earn some amount of yield that that's that's a new phenomenon for for the

average person, right? it was always kind of available to to like wealthier or kind of institutional international folks, but to to offer anyone with a smartphone the ability to tap into effectively the the kind of like US treasury rate is pretty powerful. And then the natural buyers of of those are the people building those financial products, right? these global fintexs, these kind of, you know, anyone building on top of this stable coin infrastructure is is going to be able to want to buy treasuries to to support those types of products.

>> Absolutely. And you know, that is one of the primarily financial exports, one of the main exports of the US. You know, there's a whole another conversation around exporting things like you know, US equities, but that is that's another conversation. Um, and so for for the purpose of this one, you know, it feels as if there's been this Neoank Cambrian explosion. To your point, a lot of this is driven by stable coins. And it is not only putting US dollars into the hands of people abroad that typically didn't have access to, you know, what was a more reasonably inflation resistant currency, but also giving those uh people around the world a opportunity and a source of yield that they are now able to generate as a result of

combining stable coins with some of the DeFi primitives that, you know, we we've come to know and love. And a lot of those DeFi primitives are now getting rerated because to your point about this barbell between speculation and payments, stable coins when they first started were primarily the denomination for cryptonative assets. You know, Tether started on Bitfinex and needed a way to trade against dollars and not denominate against Bitcoin for some of these cryptos. And so you had US do uh USDT. Similarly, you had USDC and that was kind of like the backbone for a lot of uh you had a lot of uh you know cryptonnative payments and infrastructure that was taking place there. And so we had the rise of stable coins but again the TAM was primarily

just cryptonative assets. Now it feels like not only DeFi is getting rerated for all of these tokenized asset classes, but stable coins as well is getting rerated for the global TAM, not just the TAM of cryptonative assets. And so when you think about this barbell speculation and payments and you think about the graduation of the stable coin, you know, use case primarily for cryptonatives but now broadening to global payments use cases, how do you think about that maturation and how do you think about the the trajectory of stable coins along this path?

>> Yeah, so you're completely right. The stable coins were kind of solving a need and and this goes back to my days at Coinbase. access to the global banking system for crypto companies was extremely difficult and outside of a small number of companies, Coinbase being one of the few. uh most crypto exchanges had no ability to tap into the fiat system and you know trading crypto for crypto uh is a little tricky in terms of if you think like from a unit of account standpoint and then you're having two different assets volatility whereas pairing something like Bitcoin or ETH or Salana with a dollar that is far more intuitive and and and frankly useful and so I think in that void over the last decade you you had these kind

offshore companies build very successful stable coins and you know to your point about it being large buyers of US treasuries and and things like that. there's always kind of this gray area component to this and and rumors, oh, they're not necessarily backed or you know, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme, all all all the kind of uh you know, things that people have said over the past, but post Genius, the landscape to shift dramatically, right? So not only do you now have regulatory clarity for the kind of above board the companies that have been trying to build in the US from day one. I think USDC is a great example of this. You now have new stable coins getting created with partners that would have never touched stable coins to begin with. I think uh open standard from Stripe but but also Visa and Mastercard.

So think about these are companies that would have not touched stable coins before but postgenius there's a regulatory framework that a a traditional regulated financial company is is going to be comfortable leaning in and then even uh uh traditional stable coin issuers I think tether just released that they have a full audit from uh their kind of big four auditor and so the the space is far more mature now and so in a world where you started maybe with crypto speculation and pairing it just for trading we're now in a place where big enterprises can use it and and trust it for payments. Um, and so I think I think that it's worth giving credit is stablecoin was a cryptonative innovation to solve a problem that was focused on the

speculation side of things. But I think with Genius now going back to that barbell framework, we actually do have a barbell because Genius created a very clear set of use cases that otherwise were always technically possible, but no kind of big enterprise was going to be willing to take the that kind of gray area risk few times now and it is because it's systemically important to the stable coin industry. you know, it it feels as if and I'm curious about you, you know, your take on this, but it feels as if banks were somewhat off sides and and kind of behind the eightball when it came to Genius because then they fought tooth and nail against a lot of the very same or similar issues in the Clarity Act. And so, you know, given that yield

is such a significant component of this, I I saw an announcement recently that, you know, there are large institutional, you know, systemically important banks in the US that are now working on spinning up their stable coin programs. How how are banks thinking about entering the stable coin space? Was it really like when they were fighting tooth and nail first against genius then against clarity was it really just to buy themselves time because at the same time you know there was whether you call it a conspiracy or a rumor there was this idea that stable coins at scale could cause capital flight out of depository institutions which is no surprise when you look at the numbers

it's just math I mean why am I going to deposit into a depository institution fiat get two three basis points a year on my savings when I could go into the neo banks that you described and get four, five, you know, six, 7% through some sort of digital treasury program. How are banks thinking about capital flight now that they have had a little bit more time to spin up their stable coin programs? And then how as a stable coin company do you react or partner with or compete against the banks that are entering the stable coin space? >> Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack there.

I think um if we go back to Genius, the banks didn't really fight Genius or maybe weren't as involved. And I think post Genius there there ended up being some FUD around this idea of like capital flight and and a couple other memes that got out there that I think created some headwinds for clarity. That said, one the crypto industry and the, you know, kind of tradi were able to come to a bunch of kind of compromises on clarity. And I think clarity didn't pass not because of the banks or or the crypto companies. I think there were just some other elements at play and who knows what happens next year after the election. Maybe maybe there's a new kind of bipartisan I mean they were really really close on that. I think that the

other thing worth pointing out is that in at least in clarity there were a few kind of compromises based on kind of what's the law in Genius that they were willing to kind of tweak to kind of say okay that seems somewhat reasonable to to change. Well, the reality is Clary hasn't passed or, you know, is is no longer viable in its current state. Genius is the law. So, I actually think what the game on the field and and I actually think that there's a lot of um you know, folks are saying, "Oh, banks are fighting, but every bank we talk to is doing something with stable coins."

So, they're actually taking it really seriously. And so, even if they're trying to kind of tweak things at at the legislative level for a future bill, they're taking the Genius Act as law and and serious. So, uh, we're getting a lot of engagement from banks on stable coins and I I think the push that I would say again to just step back, stable coins provide more competition and it allows uh whether it's a neo bank or an existing kind of fintech um to just provide a new set of financial services and kind of better, faster or cheaper that is going to force other participants in the market, call it banks, to compete and and I think that that's good, right? if if you have a

checking account and you're not getting paid interest to use that checking account, whereas a a kind of a stable coin denominated NEO bank and and you're getting some of the upside of the basically a stable coin is backed by treasury is one way to think about it going back to the beginning of the conversation that that seems pretty reasonable that the consumer should participate in that. And just because the banks have always had it that way, I I think time to, you know, kind of update up the the system on that. And so I I I think they're taking it seriously. I think the the forward-leaning banks are are saying, "Hey, this can actually provide new financial services for for our customers, but I think overall more competition is is good and I and I think the capital flight risk is overblown." I actually think if anything it is just

the capital will move to the companies that offer the best products and some of those companies will be banks, but other companies will be, you know, kind of challengers and and I think that that's really healthy. >> I agree with you. I I as a fair market capitalist, I agree that it's healthy to a uh I I don't happen to have a a bank that holds a, you know, a monopoly on, you know, a particular, you know, zone of of capital deposits. So maybe if I was, I'd feel a little bit differently, but uh I agree with you that I think it is good and healthy for fair market competition here and may the best product win. And so, so let's talk about the product stack a little bit because you guys have made some very specific design choices around Tempo uh to make this purpose-built for stable coins at

scale. And most recently, very recently, uh you announced Tempo zones are live. And so, let's talk about Tempo zones a little bit. Um maybe you can tell us a little bit about why the privacy feature on a stable coin chain is important. We've seen economic zones on blockchains be attempted before. Why are tempo zones a little bit different and why is it important to integrate privacy into Tempo? >> Yes, I think it's worth kind of Tempo is really focused on payments. We've done a bunch of features when we launched the chain earlier this year that are novel around payments both on just kind of the the usability and developer experience for payments, prioritizing payments in blockspace compliance, a bunch of great

stuff. That said, the feedback that we've gotten from customers, especially enterprises that are maybe kind of just getting into crypto or stable coins for the first time, is they're surprised that blockchains are by definition public and they're not used to having their customer balances or payments that are going out to customers be public. Right? If you're a large global marketplace or you're a large payroll company, when you're moving money over fiat rails, uh you you don't have other people, you know, viewing it. maybe maybe the the network itself or some regulator compliance, but that that's well within the bounds of what you're willing to accept. You you you don't want folks with the Dune dashboard to be able to say, "Hey, here are all of the, you know, I'm a payroll company. Here

are all of the people getting paid. Oh, here's the other activity that they're doing here. I potentially could even dock someone." That's just untenable for an enterprise that that's used to that level of privacy just from a customer experience standpoint. And so we took that feedback and and came back with Tempo zones, which is a way to make balances transactions DeFi, completely private while still having tight interoperability with Tempo, the kind of like mainet, the public part of the chain. And without getting into the many of the two technical components, we basically took a lot of what's happened in the Ethereum L2 ecosystem and tried to collapse it in a simple way that allows a an enterprise

to kind of run their own, you can think of it as like an L2 um and we call it a zone, but but it's vastly simplified from a just kind of operational complexity standpoint. And the important thing is it gives the enterprise control. So in terms of who can participate, who can view what's going on, that's obviously important for them in terms of their ability to kind of see what their customers are doing, but also important for partners. They have auditors and compliance regulators. So I I think there are a lot of different ways to do privacy in crypto.

Our privacy approach is very focused on what do enterprises want? How can we make it pragmatic and simple? And how can we make it work within the existing regulatory framework that they have to comply with? How much of this creates fragmentation by design in order to keep things siloed and keep things private amongst the institutions themselves that are running these zones. And how much composability do you give up which is you know primarily one of the value ads and the benefits of you know these blockchainbuilt components is their composability. Do you give up any composability by adding privacy to these tempo zones? practically no because the the the beauty of zones is that it's

it's interoperable with the public part of the chain. Um in the same way that I think one analogy to think about is we have corporate intranets and then we have internet, right? And so when you're using a web browser, you can use a kind of like an internal app for your company that is not actually going out to the public internet. it's kind of within your private cloud or data center and then you can easily move to a website in the same interface that that kind of works you know publicly. So I think that is roughly what we're doing without again getting into the technical specifics. And so our the ergonomics of of that experience are really important and and I think one thing that's important for any blockchain is liquidity. And so having a siloed um kind of privacy solution that doesn't

allow you to tap into the the kind of global stable coin liquidity or or DeFi liquidity on Tempo I think is a non-starter. And so team has worked really hard to kind of like make that work and and the feedback so far has been it is working and people like it and it seems to be resonating the market. >> The technical specifics because we spent years going through like modular blockchain architecture and teaching ourselves about these kinds of things. We have a network of audience members that you know are working and you know are our developers and engineers on on privacy technology and building these chains. if it's, you know, proprietary secrets, no problem. But just curious to just kind of unpack the way this does work technically to achieve

interoperability without fragmentation. >> So, I'm going to misstate it myself in terms of we have a lot of smart people on the team. Um, you know, Liam Horn was actually one of the co-founders of Optimism. He's kind of leading the product work on the the privacy side of things. We have a very in-depth technical blog post that actually um is outlining how zones work and like we've been working on them for the last year and so I don't want to give you a bad version of a technical explanation when someone has done a great job writing it up.

>> No problem to totally understood. Everyone go check out that blog post. And and and to your point, I mean you guys have been building this for a year. it feels still somewhat new and dare I say like opaque because we haven't really like dove in and seen you know all of the activity that's happening here. So maybe you know you guys can catch us up. I mean recently I think you guys had like a six months timeline that you rolled out and you said you know these are some of the things that we've accomplished over the last six months. Maybe you can give us the highlights like what is it like inside of Tempo at you know the six month mark post mainet launch. Yeah. So, I think we're starting to get a lot of traction with enterprises. We we had a lot of

announcements up front of people who have kind of committed to work with us, but as you can imagine, enterprise deployment of pilots can take time, right? We're not we're not dealing with consumer crypto here. It's um big companies that have a lot of requirements, a lot of stakeholders. So, we are making progress with those, but they take time to come live. Uh deal is a great example of a company that is growing extremely fast. They've been live since June. Um we have a couple more that are launching soon, but um Meow is another company. They um are kind of like a neo bank that is really focused on kind of giving businesses the best access to kind of like high yield both with traditional treasuries but also within stable coins. So those are two examples of companies that are live,

but I think a lot more coming live in Q4 here. And the other thing that we've been making a lot of progress on is the technical side of things. So, we've done a I think 11 network upgrades. Maybe even by the time this goes live, it might be 12. Um, I think a couple of of big things that we've done. One, we've actually done a bunch of work at the protocol level for agentic payments. Uh, we have this protocol that we co-created with Stripe called MPP. And we have a concept within MPPP called sessions which essentially allows you to boot up a a payment channel for for those who are technical and know that from the Ethereum world and you as an agent or or kind of the client and a server can

offchain do payments at the speed of packets and then settle that payment session into a single transaction on tempo for a tenth of a cent. So that was kind of a proposal that we had at the beginning of the year when we were launching MPP that is now baked into Tempo at the chain level. So it's it's it's hyper optimized. Um we have several other compliance features that we've added to the chain which again maybe is less sexy for your traditional like crypto native but for enterprises that's really important. So I think a really good example is dusting is a thing that happens on public chains. People in crypto have just said, "Hey, that's the reality of using a public blockchain."

On Tempo, you can prevent that. And like I said, I think some people may say, "Yeah, that's antithetical or I'm not that interested in doing that." Well, I can tell you enterprises that really resonates with because they have compliance requirements that they have to maintain. And and a last one I just think is a good example is like virtual addresses. anyone who has built crypto products at scale. So just thinking of our time at Coinbase, the amount of time doing reconciliation between uh deposit addresses and uh the dust and the sweeping that happens to have like this is real pain in the ass with Bitcoin. Uh going back to my time at Coinbase, with Tempo, you can just generate uh as many addresses as you want that all settle to a single wallet and then you don't have to do any of that additional accounting

and sweeping. And so these are features that we, you know, we're the team is extremely cryptonative and has been building in crypto for the last decade. We've always wanted embedded in these other kind of chains we've built on and they just kind of you've always had to do it at the middleware layer or come up with a hacky solution. And so we're just systematically going through things that we've always wished exist at the blockchain level and then just do it. Dan, I think you know you and your team are representative of a broader phenomenon that's happening right now in not just crypto but in finance and technology broadly, which is that as we see more of this, frankly institutional FOMO, this institutional adoption, we've got these digital asset teams and blockchain teams inside of incumbent

financial firms and technology firms that have been around for sometimes centuries. Um and so h how is it being on a crypto team inside of Stripe which is a broader organization doing you know $2 trillion like a significant portion of you know global GDP and and you know this I think extends to several teams right at banks and financial institutions there's typically these small teams maybe a half a dozen to a dozen people that are building out what feels like very important infra infrastructure for the next generation of finance and technology, but they're doing it as like.1% of the workforce at these institutions.

Maybe you can just speak to that and speak to, you know, what it what it feels like to be part of that department that is building important things inside of a greater institution. >> Yeah. So, one clarification, we are a kind of independent company from Stripe, but they are very close partners. So I think you know Tempo wouldn't be having the momentum we have today without our close partnership with Stripe. But um we one one advantage is like we very much are our own startup uh in that like you know we can move at the speed we can move and and we're not beholden to any big company requirements which I think is really good for us in terms of making progress. I think um that said I I'd say that there are kind of like two or three rough categories of of companies leaning

into stable coins right now. So the first is um the cryptonative companies. So it's why how we are here today and and I think neo banks a lot of times fall into this where they are uniquely enabled or a core part of their business only exists because of the fact that they have permissionless access to stable coin rails. And if you just look at volumes today that is the bread and butter for stable coins. So I think we'd be remiss not to to to lead with like stable coins are being used by new companies cryptonative companies. they are building kind of real world use cases and it's an area that like we're very much competing for their business with Tempo and trying to build the set of features like you know virtual addresses where companies that have had

to deal with this is like wow what a refreshing thing I can I can go use tempo and I can get rid of this uh middleware that I I hate having to maintain. I think the second category is enterprise customers but I would say not financial institutions and so these are these are global marketplaces the door dashes of the world um and uh deal which is kind of you know it's it's a fintech it's regulated but like very much a kind of upand cominging new company growing extremely fast these companies I think they're founder so they naturally just have a pace which is Silicon Valleyesque and that they are willing to with a very small team of people make a bet on stable coins and move quickly and and

and scale volumes. And so very much an area that I I think for us the partnership with Stripe really helps because a lot of these customers already work with Stripe across a variety of products both on the fiat side and the stablecoin side. And then the third category what I would say is like Tradfi. Uh this is actually where I've been most impressed having spent a lot of time with Tradfi over the last decade especially when I was at Coinbase. There's always a lot of like excitement about doing something in crypto and then you hit like a compliance or regulatory roadblock and okay great well I guess we can't do it and so you have a hundred meetings and you actually get nowhere.

To your point I do think postgenius the trady companies are leaning in and you've seen uh you know Mastercard uh purchase BVNK so like that I think is like a great sign of like leaning into the side of things. I think Visa like uh you know another close partner of ours like Kai at Visa I don't know if you you follow him on Twitter or you kind of see him out there the amount of stuff that they're doing in terms of leaning into stable coins leaning into agentic payments it's it's quite refreshing frankly because I I always had this opinion that like generally big companies they're willing to take a meeting but they're willing to not do anything but I but I do think it it again I always harp on this genius has unlocked a level of regulatory certainty

that big companies are willing to actually do something for the first time in crypto. And so MoneyGram is another good example of a company that, you know, they're doing stuff with us on Tempo, but broadly has leaned completely into crypto. And, you know, a lot of people would have said it's like, oh, it's like a traditional remittance company that you go in person and pay cash, but realizing that they have a global network of 500,000 physical locations and then being able to plug crypto rails in, they can find efficiencies as well as actually provide liquidity to the overall kind of global dollar ecosystem. Yeah, you know, I I'm curious how the journey with some of these partners has gone given the path that Tempo has taken. Tempo, then OpenUSD

sort of created it, you know, it created quite a stir in, you know, kind of the the cryptobuilder industry because people were looking at some of the design choices and and look, I think, you know, as a as an ethos, this industry is not as decentralized as it once was and maybe that's for the best, but there's also been sort of I think maybe some misconceptions around how these larger teams who are now entering the space are going to accept and maneuver and navigate the stablecoin world and the greater you know onchain world. And so I think you know one of the things that happened was for instance you know open USD came out there was a lot of support behind it and maybe one misconception was that the

partners that were on that announcement. It was thought to be that that open USD stable coin was really the only stable coin or stable coin standard that those partners would work within. But then I think later we found out that you know these teams like you know some of the ones that you've mentioned still want to support the entire stablecoin industry right they don't want to give up potentially a large amount of volume that is going through some of these other stable coins as well like you know some of the the duopoly that has you know kind of led the stable coin market thus far. And so how is Tempo working with some of its partners in terms of OpenUSD and then also you know in terms of executing on Tempo? Is it like hey if

you're on Tempo you're only on Tempo and that's you know a standard that you hold your partners to or is it like hey you know Tempo you can have a Tempo zone it's interoperable within Tempo but it's also interoperable within the greater stable coin chain world and also if you're on OpenUSD. Same goes for the stable coins. You're interoperable within the greater stable coin world. >> Yeah. So, I think of four characteristics of blockchains in crypto that make them interesting. And I think decentralization just given the original Bitcoin white paper and crypto culture tends to get way more attention and people like to fight about it and like the vibe when the reality is there there are kind of like three other things I

think make public blockchains really useful. Um so the first is permissionless, right? I don't have to ask anyone to be able to go do anything with it. We we talked about how neo banks or or kind of new startups can just boot up with stable coins. they don't have to go get a special bank relationship and kind of the ability to do that now postgenius in a kind of regulatory you know uh with regulatory clarity I think that's extremely underrated I always I always bring that up I think programmable is another thing right so if you think about traditional like fiat rails they're very crude systems like if you've done anything at scale with a you're literally uploading like a batch file to FTP and they do it

once a day whereas guys think about crypto. I you know just talking about sessions you could be literally doing uh millions of payments over a very short period of time just completely programmatic and then obviously with agents that that only increases from there. So decentralization um permissionless programmable and I think interoperable which you said is the thing that people don't actually discuss enough is look tempo is its own chain there are other chains Ethereum Salana base Robin Hood has its own chain all of those are interoperable in the sense that because they have those other characteristics and and you could put the decentralization aside if you believe the the kind of corporate chains or a chain backed by a big company isn't

isn't decentralized. If you actually zoom out that the overall system is decentralized because I can take my stable coin, I can easily swap it from a genius compliance stable coin to something like you know die or sky like so you can move into a different asset uh permissionlessly right with a unis swap and then I can go bridge that to another chain and so the ability to programmatically do that gives you actual choice and it increases competition where it's if if you know tempo isn't doing something well enough for our customers, they are going to have the ability because of the interoperability to switch. So it forces us to provide better features, service, experience. And so I think that the increase in competition contrast to you

know a or fed wire or or kind of like more traditional payment methods, the ability to actually just if you have a better faster cheaper way of doing something and you can convince people that interoperability makes it really really easy. And so I actually think in aggregate you are increasing decentralization even in a world where some of the bigger players that may have not been into crypto the last decade are starting to come in. And I think it's worth pointing out distribution is worth a lot right and why why if you've built a business at scale and you have millions of customers whether that's kind of on a a merchant side of things like Stripe or or Robin Hood on the consumer side you you you should benefit from the fact that you do have that distribution. But I think that what gets

lost is is crypto folks then say, "Oh, well, you should be doing it on my decentralized chain, which by the way, I have a bunch of the underlying tokens, so hopefully the my number goes up when the reality is you are increasing decentralization to the overall financial system because every single one of these chains that gets uh customer funds into stable coins on chain in aggregate is is is benefiting crypto relative to to kind of the traditional fiat system. And if if you're so great, just just win on the merits. Win on having a better experience on earn, having better uh you know, payment features, having better swap features. What what whatever the the market is saying, you know, people want you have to actually go deliver on.

And so it I always just find it funny. It's like people are decentralization maxis until they they get hit in the face with competition and then they're saying, "Oh, well, you should be using my thing because I was here first." It's like doesn't work like that. And so I think decentralization is a a function of the increased competition not like a characteristics of of one chain as somehow being holier than >> is funny and and it it is you know the decentralization maxis and a maxi in any regard is is philosophically captured by that you know ideology you know and so we're we're still trying to do our best to kind of bring people over and help them see the light. Some people are going to be maximalist till the day they die. So, you know, we'll we'll we'll, you know, wish them well.

But I want >> I mean, on that on that point, I I spent 5 years trying to build Farcaster, right? Decentralized social network. And then I'd have people on Twitter telling me, "Oh, the here's why I don't want to like, you know, practice what you preach." They didn't necessarily do it. And so my sense is look, X is a better platform because you have bigger audience. People are willing to go do it. And and so that's the competition. And so if new chains come and they offer better features and and just a better overall experience, people are going to use those chains. And so I think what people should be really focused on is how can I make crypto overall a better experience and kind of deliver the functionality that gets people to go from the traditional fiat financial system onchain?

>> Do just on that do you think consumer crypto broadly do you think social web 3 or web 3 broadly is that dead? Like are we done with social? Maybe not social because you got FOMO and you got some of these things that are actually really doing well. But when it comes to the decentralized social media idea, is that is that played out? Is that over? >> Yeah, let me let me So I think the skuomorphic competitor to Twitter, I don't think that that's going to work in the near term in terms of like, okay, I'm literally going to do what I did on Twitter on a decentralized network, whether that's Farcaster or Blue Sky or Mastadon or something else, Noster.

>> Um I I just think it's kind of a dead end. there will be a niche and obviously you know blue sky is actually relatively decent scale and seems to have stabilized at a place so kudos to them. I think FOMO is a great example of something that is a new primitive and I think Anom has talked a lot about this thread guy around this idea of um like trading as entertainment trading as the new celebrities. >> I don't know if that works but like I kind of buy it and and they seem to be on the lead like leading edge of this kind of new trend and then FOMO I think really tracks that. To be clear I'm I'm not that. So forecaster was probably never going to be able to play in that area. But I but I do think like if we

think like there are no more social networks that that seems silly and I do think given AI and you probably have seen like Maltbook at the beginning of the year and now we have like Muse and Instinct and they're like having some social components. I mean obviously Meta knows what they're doing in terms of social networks but even even the hugging face thing where like I think maybe a bit overblown but there was a social element to that. So I I think I'd be you'd be hardressed to say there will be no new uh atscale social networks and agents won't naturally create some whether it's some interplay like uh human plus agent or just agent to agent but but I have to imagine that there will be new social experiences that emerge and here's the best thing about

like kind of these superhuman coding tools is what used to take you a big team and you have to raise millions of dollars you could if you if you have the great idea on how to go build this. You could probably build it with, you know, uh a monthly subscription to cloud code, right? So, so I I think I'm I'm very excited for the potential for new social experiences. Um I am less bullish on rebuild Twitter in a decentralized way. I spent 5 years working on that. Like you can technically do it. The network effect is a lot harder. So I I would I would look for things that look weird and maybe not like Twitter to start if if you were to kind of bet on it. But I think overall like the death of NFTTS and all that I think it's just a a kind

of cyclical thing and I think 10 20 years from now if you were to tell me I have digitally scarce assets from the early early you know kind of blockchain era internet and we're spending more time online and you're you're wearing like a headset or neural link I I think there's probably going to be something there. I just if if I knew the path to get there I'd probably be working on a company there. pretty good time to buy a punk nowadays before E3 really gets going. We'll see. >> I saw a great tweet on that actually. Someone someone said, "If we're going to be talking to our agents all the time, how are we going to represent our agents?" And someone, I think, posted just like photos of crypto punks. And it's like, okay, if you're going to be spending a lot of time with this thing

and you want to have a status thing, do do you put a punk on it or something? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's like buying a skin, you know, in a video game. Um, so I I want to get back actually to the four components of this industry that you find interesting and and different and and innovative. Two of them I think are a little bit less interesting for where we're going. Be it permissionless and decentralized because permissionless I think ultimately brings down the barrier to entry for you know kind of companies that previously like you said had to have a special bank relationship. Now anyone can do it. It's permissionless.

the decentralization I think you know we got really far down on that spectrum but ultimately it it improves security and now we kind of take that for granted let's just call that table stakes the two things that I think are primarily most interesting in terms of the creative imaginative innovations that we can really use to think about like stable coins at scale are programmable and interoperable because it feels like and I think the Robin Hood example is actually a really good one to just kind of paint this picture we didn't know that we were going to get memecoins paired with equities. Like that was something totally non-skeorphic that no one really thought about. No one really predicted until we saw it happen right in front of our eyes. And it feels as if we're going to get similar use cases and

and similar non-skeumorphic phenomenons around stable coins primarily driven by the programmability and the interoperability of stable coins at scale. And I'm just curious because you've thought about this a lot. Like can you just flex your imagination for us a little bit? Like are there any non-skeorphic use cases that you've seen that maybe haven't really gotten attention kind of flying on the radar? Just things that when you kind of put your creative mind to work here that you anticipate are really going to gain a lot more in terms of market share, popularity. anything that you're most excited about on stable coins that you think is going to be driven by programmable and interoperable tech at

scale? >> Yeah, so let me caveat with it rough shape because I haven't actually spent time trying to build the product and there's you know it's like the Mike Tyson things like everyone's have has a great idea until you get punched in the face by like the market not using it. I think two examples. So one payroll today you get paid twice a month for the most part. Some places can do paid by the day. What's stopping you from literally getting streaming payments? Like I am working for x amount of time. I am getting paid up until the exact second I've left and I don't even have to wait even a like it just the money is there as soon as I'm done. Right. So I I think this idea of just like real time payments and and obviously the the kind of like time scale you could adjust, but

if if I could go work at X or Y and one is willing to pay me every day versus one is to pay me two weeks, all things being equal, you you take the one there. So I think it's a great example. It's it's technically possible with the fiat system. Sure. I think it gets a lot more complex. There's like actual fixed costs. There's like you literally cannot pay someone via certain payment methods on a weekend or a holiday. Cross border is hard. So I think I think that is a a whole like interesting area of like how how fast can I pay people or agents for whatever value they're providing me. Um speed wins, right? So I think that that that's like an interesting area. I think um

here's like an idea that I've always thought was interesting. again technically feasible and and you know people who churn credit cards because that's what they like doing and there's like a whole subreddit for this. Um there are high high um uh interest checking accounts or or savings accounts as a way to like banks to acquire customers right with a programmable interoperable blockchain. You could imagine having like a product like you're like a meta neo bank basically where you move a consumer's stable coin balance across chain across stable coins across uh DeFi vaults to wherever I get the best yield within whatever risk parameter and I don't even have to think about it. in in a world with agents like

maybe you could even build the product yourself but like that's like a thing where potentially right now I could talk to cloud code or codeex for five minutes have it point to the docs tempo docs whatever what but but the point being is now because you're interoperable I can move between chain X to chain Y and between different different D5 protocols it it's all possible so it's actually it's it's it's imagination limited really and and so I think that is where we're finally getting to both in that the infrastructure is finally there right like chains are really fast coins are there like you can all all the stuff that you need uh the smart wallets I

think that like those are all big unlocks you have the regulatory clarity so now you actually have much better connectivity into the fiat system and you you know your average bank or fintech actually does have stable coin support so you can kind of move it in and out not just kind of going to a crypto exchange and then the last part is you have superhuman coding ability. So I I I I'll give you an example, you know, kind of wrap up. We had an internal hackathon. Um people built a bunch of cool stuff. The thing I had always wanted, uh this is when I was at Farcaster and I could never convince the the team to go build it is I had all of these like random meme coins and dust assets in my wallet and they just like pollute the wallet and I I don't know a

little OCD like I don't like having them in there. uh you can manually go in and try to hide or maybe the wallet is like has some heristics and it tries to hide them for you. But my my point was like if the the chain is cheap enough, why am I not going through programmatically for every one of these assets? If there is uh liquidity in unis swap, swap it, get get USDC or whatever whatever you know kind of pair they have with that and then if it is worthless just just throw it to the burn address just like get it out of my wallet. Um, and I was able to build that. Like, so it's it's uh like is that a product in the app store? No. But like it's just like your imagination is the limiting constraint here now. So I think I think crypto is very out of favor in

some ways compared to AI in in the zeitgeist. But I'm very excited as as these superhuman coding tools only get better and better. There's just a lot of surface area that people can now go build, right? Like think about all the crazy ideas probably people had during the NFT boom that they were limited on their ability to have a smart contract engineer work with them or an artist. You could you could go do both now. So it's like sky's the limit like road map you can do your road map now. So it's like actually do do you actually have a good road map? Um, so so that that's that's kind of like my bull take for crypto as a broad category is like these things are extremely powerful and we're now at a place where if you are an idea guy like if you want to go execute

against it you can. Now I would I would caveat is like probably worth getting your smart contract uh checked over by someone who understands that or run it against a few models because you're actually moving money around. But maybe for low stake stuff, for experiments, you could be uh okay. >> Dan Romero, head of go to market at Tempo. Thank you so much. Absolutely appreciate it. And uh you're absolutely right. Uh if our imagination is the limit, well then there are no limits. So think bigger, dream bigger. Uh and thanks for spending some time with us today. Thanks for having me.