How Stablecoins Will Disrupt Global Commerce - Fireblocks VP Payments

Transcript

How can we as virlocks make the wallet smaller smaller smaller smaller so they could be agentic AI size, but also more efficient. >> What I would consider the the interoperability for everything outside of that. So banktobank communication on and off ramps, last mile. 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 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. Welcome back to Money Moves Fast, the premier live show for st for payments RWA's tokenization. I am here today with Ran Goldie, the head of

payments at Fireblocks amongst other important roles in his career. This show is presented by Polygon, one of the leading chains in payments for crypto. Uh tested, battle tested, fast, cheap. uh with a big upgrade coming soon. I know Fireblocks and Polygon are close friends as well. Ran, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on. >> Thanks, Andy. Love to be here. Love the energy. This is probably one of uh I would say my most viewed show. So, thank you for having me. >> Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, Ran, it's your first time. Uh it's good it's good to meet you as well. Um I'm glad that you took the time and yeah, man, just a quick, you know, intro about how you got into your role. you have quite the uh quite the background and I think it'd be

helpful just to get some context. >> Yeah. No, so um I'm I'm you know I'm I'm basically here because uh I've got sucked into this world about 10 years ago uh into I would say the world of crypto by uh by E Toro's uh co-founder and CEO. He was the one that told me to buy my first Bitcoin before I knew what it was. And uh I I fell in love this and I before this I was in I was in finance. I actually took one of my companies public before I fell in love into finance. But this was obviously different. Uh so I started a company that was doing payments over blockchain.

That was 2017. You could basically tell a taxi driver you're doing Bitcoin. He will like give you money over right in there. And that was like the easy part. But then obviously crypto winters, some other stormy weathers. And at the end of the day, we were able um I think to create some really cool tech around payments and got acquired by Fireblocks about, you know, four years ago. >> Ever since I've been leading the payments and network divisions with Fireblocks, uh which has been nothing short of amazing obviously because the last four years I think that you know crypto and digital asset have been payments, right? Especially this year with stable coins where stable coins are pretending to solve world hunger as well, right? So, so it's it's been a great journey.

>> Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. No, I think uh the entrepreneur to the uh head of a a uh you know branch is a bit of a different transition, but it it sounds like it sounds like it was fruitful and it sounds like you you guys have built some really cool stuff um you know back in the day. So, Fireblocks has had a very interesting journey, right? Like if you think if you think back to like 21 and you know 2019 kind of cycle, Firebox was like the enterprise uh kind of network uh category that was kind of hot in the 2018 bare when security tokens were kind of a thing and people were trying to figure that out and custody was a big thing. Uh then Firebox kind of went back under the radar a bit. I feel like with the L1 cycle of 21, 22, 23,

everyone was kind of gung-ho about all these other kind of crypto apps, DeFi. Now, Firebox is right back in the center of attention. People are teasing an IPO. You guys are absolutely crushing it on the revenue side in terms of your custody business as well as your other offerings. Um, and so it's kind of been a it's been an eb and a flow for the last eight eight-ish years of Fireblocks. Um, and recently you have just launched what you guys are calling the Swift for stable coins network. Um, so would love to hear about this and really just would love to hear about Fireblocks's thesis as a whole for the payments kind of space in crypto and kind like generally how you're thinking about this space as it's evolved.

>> All right, an easy question then. Okay, fine. So, let's break it down, I guess. So, you know, first of all, Fireblocks, I guess, consider itself first and foremost as you know, an infrastructure for this world, right? So if you're a payments company out there or you know a fintech like Revolute or New Bank or like I said a payments company like Wall Pay or Visa whatever and you want to build on this rail that's called blockchain and again you know our view is this is another payments rail right there's there's a there's wires there's faster payment rails out there blockchain is another payments rail and if you are in the business of moving money that's a rail you need to get connected to same way as I tell you if

you're a bank you need to connect to you know the Fed or you need to connect to Swift whatever. So first of all that's our thesis and our thesis is that over time all of obviously the payment companies but all of the fintexs and eventually all of the businesses by all these layers that will be enabled every business in the world will use this tech and again I I would say that my personal thesis is you know this is this is very similar to what we have in I don't know communications right like we're still having a phone call I can call you Andy from my iPhone uh but I've been I could have called you also likeund and something years ago ago when Graham Bell invented the phone. But now we have better infrastructure. I can also text you. I can call you with, you know, like

video. I can send you very stupid memes on iMessage. I can do a lot of stuff that I couldn't, but I can do that because of infrastructure. We could just do more things. This is an infrastructure upgrade. So that I guess that's like part of your question was what's our thesis? Um specifically about the network, you know, the problem with a lot of these companies that are coming into our space, especially in the last 12 to 18 months where there's a large, you know, very big momentum due to regulation of our stuff and more incumbents are coming in, more large payment companies, banks are coming in, right? Um we've probably been talking to more than 200 banks over the last six months that are coming.

>> They all want to launch stable coins, don't they? >> Well, we tell them that they shouldn't, right? like uh and and this really bums up people uh like the first question is what's a stable coin? The second question okay should we issue a stable coin. Uh but but no then they actually form a good strategy I hope. Um and um that the thing is that a lot of these companies are coming in and you know they now want to use stable coins and send a payment to Mexico and send a payment to Africa and they have no idea who to work over there. And because Fireblocks, as you said, has been, you know, we sort of been in the right place in the right time with the right tech.

And 70% of the world's institutions runs on Fireblocks. Um, you know, we run 15% of all the blockchain transactions globally. We there's this year it will be about $5 trillion. So we run a lot of the infrastructure of these off-ramps in Mexico, in Singapore, in Brazil, and whatever. And what we really did is like bring all of our, you know, great partners and clients together into this one network and tell every client that comes in, hey, you want to now use this magic that called stable coins to move money faster. Great. Here's a catalog of everyone in the world in a 100 countries you can actually use and send money through. So that's the idea of the network. And again the idea is that it's

open you know like if if by the way if swift wants to connect to the network come into the network right >> and when you say network it's we're not think we're not thinking like consensus based node architecture here like a blockchain we're talking like a more distributed ledger kind of network or a kind of more of like a database network just like you know how like what exactly does network mean in this context? Yeah, I think that's a it's a really good question, Handy Andy, because everyone right now is either issuing a stable coin or a layer one, right? >> Yes. Or or both. A stable coin layer one call, which is exactly what we need, more layer ones. But um no, it's it's neither of that. It's basically allowing uh Fireblocks to because all of

these people run on Fireblocks then from within your you know workspace within your API whatever you could access all of them programmatically uh over any blockchain whatever you want whatever coin you want to move through that but because they're all on the Fireblocks network there's a basic trust element and a basic way to communicate and move messages around and really create these payment flows end to end, right? So, no, it's not a blockchain. No, it's not a protocol. No, it's not um it's not DeFi. It's it's it's just a um a simple network you can, you know, in a way mimics how Visa connects between different merchants and acquirers and whatnot.

>> Yep, makes sense. So on this kind of note around people wanting to launch a stable coin and people wanting to launch L1s, you know, it does kind of seem like Fireblocks becomes an important almost like middleware or part of the infrastructure stack for a lot of them. Um, but also I think there's a point to be made with regards to like just general competition. And so like Cloudfare for example just announced their CEO comes out and says look there's a net dollar stable coin for a gentic web payments coming out. Like this is a thing that we're going to be pushing. Agents are going to be interacting with each other in the in the wild using stable coinbased payments. Like this is the there's no credit card. There's no, you know, three-digit code on the back of their

card. There's no expiration date. You don't have to KYC. You can just use an Aentic wallet or a Gentic, you know, account on chain. So I'm curious if you see, you know, in this example like Cloudfire, you know, stablecoin or other big tech stable coins as a threat to what Fireblocks is trying to do or do you see this as an opportunity for you guys to grow? No, I think first of all I think that's awesome that these companies are coming in and again you know whether they're issuing as as we just make you know laughed about a stable coin or layer one or if they're issuing AI u agentic SDKs to do payments with stable coins. I think all of that is great and I think that you know we're

using Cloudflare and uh at Fireblocks I'm sure if Cloudflare scales and needs to issue a billion wallets like what we do for a living they'll probably go to a company either Fireblocks or someone else that that's their main business. That said, that just the fact that they're issued that stable coin and you know that machine toachine AI to AI agent to agent payment is probably going to be something we're going to see a lot of, right? Like people are now building these MCP servers and I don't know if you if you got to cover this in the show already, but like this easy way for AI to communicate with your website or with your app, whatever. A lot of people are

writing those things. These are called MCP servers, right? So there's really no great way to monetize those or to make a living if you've built a really good agent or a really good MCP server. But but now with these payment SDKs that are coming out um it this could all change like and I think this will also roll out to Fireblocks's world in a way because there'll just be a lot more wallets a lot more assets to move securely and a lot more um let's call that end points to connect on a network that is secured which again talks to what we believe and what we do right and you know believe it or not we're spending 40 million a year just on security and we have 50 people on the payroll that are either you know

our hackers or other security devs sec ops people just so so this is like uh obviously this is not a hobby moving money securely so I'm I'm sure that >> I'm very happy this is happening I'm sure we'll find oursel part of that mix eventually >> yeah cool no I mean I think that is kind of like one element of what's happening is more of this commercial enterprise entry into the stable coin and payments ecosystem from a lot of large players as we've already kind of alluded to and discussed and then you've got like the government entry as well. You've got like World Liberty Fi USD one, you know, I think recently there was nine major European banks forming a Eurobacked

stable coin consortium. Um, right and thinking about ways. So, I think like there's demand coming from both commercial and government level. You know, I'm curious from the government level perspective, whether it be this European bank news or just generally the way that you know, Bohines left the uh you know, uh digital assets committee and joined USA. So like there's just this government fuel demand happening as well aligning with Secretary Besson's $3 trillion of stablecoin supply by 2028.

you know, when it comes to the government creating demand for payments and for uh transactions on on blockchains, how does how does Fireblocks capture that? Like how do you make that, you know, regulated demand something that comes to Fireblocks? The wait is over. The Talis test net is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. Relay, low fees, lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at your fingertips. Instant multi-chain payments. Choose any token on any chain.

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>> We do this a lot. I'm actually trying to make my questions shorter them, you know. >> That is crazy. That's a lot of knowledge in one question. Um, look, I mean, so first of all, let's talk about the bank thing, right? Banks are obviously not a big fan of stable coins. I don't think it would shock anyone because as as a business, obviously a stable coin is not good for a bank. They cannot hold your money one for one as a reserve because that prevents them from rehypoccating it and making money on loans and interest, which is fair.

That's their business model. Um and but they have to play this game right now. Uh they have to play this game because as I said it before they have to be connected to this payments rail. So right now with stable coins I think that will evolve over time. By the way I think that you know what what is that we're using today this this dollar pegged asset I think it will change in nature maybe to a tokenized deposit maybe to something else whatever. Now obviously what everyone is wondering and you and me are sort of joking about is why is no one putting an emphasis on interoperability right and then comes this consortium of banks and says hey you know what like we're nine banks we've created this eurocoin that's

interoperable between us at least which I think is great and I think that over time what we'll see is probably more coins becoming our our way to move that is Obviously as as as we provide the infrastructure to a lot of those we're we're telling them listen here's your chance because you guys are all running on the same infrastructure let's build this interoperable from inception which a lot of them do so so that's like our also in a way >> you know u push towards that that path which I hope more will see but what I think is sort of happening right now is you know the banks are really experimenting with stable coins in a

right? It will evolve probably within a year or two to something they can actually use in a business model. Um and then the government at some point where the banks have tested this enough it will probably reach the place where you know we all thought it will already be there but like the governments themselves right and what we've seen up until now and you know governments are not you know the US government has been holding Bitcoin since 20 I think 13 probably even before like there's people in the government they know what they're doing with digital assets um and up until now they've been using tools right they've been using companies you know like like us they've been using chain analysis I think that was very public

right so I think as as this you know momentum will continue from the from you know from the payment companies to the fintex to the banks later on to the government entities then I think all of all of the people who are now providing these type of services like fireblocks like chalysis of the world will probably grow to be companies who serve governments just like Amazon by the grew to have an a a government cloud, right? Um and and by the way, this is why >> I'm sorry to say this, like I'm not trying to shamelessly promote Fireblocks. I'm just saying this is why I'm excited to work at Fireblocks because if we >> if the world continues on this trend,

then you will have probably 100x more subscribers >> and Fireblocks will probably have 100x more clients. >> Yeah. And which means we're like 1% of the company we could be a few years from now, which is why I get up in the morning. So >> yeah, it's exciting. >> I hope that answer all your questions. >> Yeah. Okay. And so all right. So that is that is like un like unpacking why there actually is a need for essentially what you this network this payments network that you're building because when you look at all these stable coins or these you know types of tokenized assets that people are trying to issue we've already seen them go and go to interoperability providers like chain link wormhole etc.

Okay, we want to have the interoperability within the blockchain ecosystem, but what Fireblocks can essentially provide is what I would consider the the interoperability for everything outside of that. So, bank-to bankank communication on and off ramps, last mile, you know, exiting into local currencies into local uh uh local, you know, commercial banks. Maybe you could just a bit further unpack the like the core the core kind of service that Fireblocks network brings because you guys are doing about $200 billion right now in stable coin flows per month. So, I'm kind of curious like is that is that like I'm trading on an exchange and then you guys are settling that or I'm sending that from Peru to Bolivia like

like you know maybe kind of explain a bit of exactly what the core services and who that target market is and then we can start to think about like and understand who's using and what's powering this uh you know current monthly flow. >> Yeah. So powerful question. So let's look at that $200 billion a month of stable coins, right? So this year probably >> will end up processing I want to say something like 2.7 trillion uh dollars of stable coins. Um let's take an example of 200 billion. 50% of that is attributed to trading >> and about 50% of that is attributed to payments. So when I say trading, I mean,

you know, exchanges run on Fireblocks, OTC desks running on Fireblocks, whatever, hedge funds, that's that's all goes to that bucket. The other 50% are real payment companies, you know, the like world pay, like Visa, like you know, bridge, you know, it's powering stripe, like those type of companies, uh, but also the B2B companies like Open Paid and Zodia Markets and Conduit. And let's take one of those companies and really talk about a use case that will help also understand the narrative of the network. Right? So let's say we have I think uh conduit is a great example.

Right? So conduit is this company that helps importers and exporters uh pay large amounts of of dollars really uh for containers they're importing to Brazil for example. So they would they'll be in Brazil, they'll get, you know, um Brazil Royale from someone, they'll convert it to a stable coin. Now they're thinking, I want to work with someone in Singapore. Um I do not know anyone in Singapore. I do not speak the local language. I do not know what's going on there. But if I go to the Fireblocks network, I see there's like two providers that work in Singapore.

Here's the currencies they work at. Here's what I need to do to open an account. I click I open an account and then I connect it to my Fireblocks world and I just send that uh that new provider let's say Zodia Marcus that operate in Singapore I send them the stable coin they then convert that back to Sing dollars and send it to whoever I ask them right so I can be a business in one country and develop my payment flows my off-ramps or my on-ramps in different countries uh without traveling there just by because I'm file box network I can be introduced to those businesses and integrate with them with one click

right so that's the magic of that network and I can when I do business with them I get all my reconciliation data normalized because it's all on the same platform I get all my trading data I get whatever just from the same platform I use for my daily treasury management so that's the concept of the network >> and would you say like that that B2B kind of crossborder payment flow is is where is driving a lot of the demand growth. >> So it it's driving 40% probably of the volume. Another uh something like 25% is payouts to gig economy employees creator that has been by the way the largest growing segment within >> Okay. Is that like Uber and like Grab

and that type of stuff or >> So it's I mean I know Grab does that uh but I'm not aware of Uber but a actually you'd be surprised. It's actually a lot a lot of these um businesses like uh Scale Scale AI that you know have like 10,000 payments they need to pay. They use Bridge to do that. Bridge uses Fireblocks. Boom. You get like hundreds of thousands of payments, right? Um, so it's a lot of those type of companies, a lot of marketplaces, a lot of actually payroll companies starting to get on this. And I think the wave I'm seeing right now, and I think you'll see it over the next three months, I would say that this last quarter or next six

months would be the remittance companies. >> So you've already seen Remittly making announcements. Moneygram uh that has done uh like wallet swift, cross mint. I think the remittance companies are getting on this train and you'll probably see a lot of them coming in and that's like a trillion dollar market. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting. >> That's like Western Union is using stable coins instead of whatever they're currently using at scale in the future type of thing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's Yeah, that's huge. Um Okay, cool. Uh one question about that though.

when I am sending a stable coin from, you know, let's call it Brazil to Miami. My cousins are in Miami. I'm in Brazil, let's say this. Um, and I'm a first-time user and I'm sending a stablecoin to like a ox address or like a name in an account. Um, I don't really I like like I don't understand that this is an unreversible or nonreversible transaction. like maybe it's my first time.

I'm curious like Circle's been hinting at exploring reversible USDC transactions. I'm curious if you think like chargebacks or you know reconciliations or pullbacks from payments for blockchain or for in these kind of like fintechy apps is going to make a big, you know, comeback or a big entrance into the scene. To me, it seems logical, but I could also see it being like, "No, we don't need that. We can just get it right the first time." And, you know, because when when I go to Venmo somebody, uh, there's no like pullback option. Sure, on PayPal, if you do a payment for services or goods, you could do a chargeback process. Venmo, maybe you could, but it it it's feels

permanent in today's world already. So, maybe consumers are used to that. I don't know. Curious your perspective. Well, I I think you know I think here's here's like an uncomfortable truth, right? So, the reason that fiat works and most payments are done on fiat still and not on digital assets is because there's trust in that closed loop ecosystem. And banks, you know, whether you like banks or not, you like Swift or not, it doesn't matter. They have a way to communicate and say, "Hey, I'm going to send you money. Here's the here's the one who's sending you this. do you want to receive it on this, you know, to this uh recipient? They do their own checks, whatever. Eventually, they say yes. You feel like it's taking a century maybe sometimes, but you know, it's safe.

There's even like a way to reverse that if you need to, right? Um and when you do commerce, which is not the same as P2P, right? As you say, Venmo, you send it, it's done. You send to your cousin, it's done, right? Talk to your cousin. But if you pay a store, you do expect as a consumer like this is why we've created consumer protection. So I really think that actually bringing those, you know, schemes and uh let's call that even behavior protocols into a blockchain makes perfect sense because we want I mean you can you can say that banks are horrible, fine. But we I'm not saying you're saying it, but like people can say that. But we want banks to run

uh on stable coins as well or some sort of digital assets so we'll be able to move money 24/7. If we want that, we need to give this industry the tools to implement that and still have the precautions they need to operate. and and this time because they're using programmatic money and programmatic maybe forms of identity then maybe that whole process where a bank talks to one another and ask questions about the identity of the sender or the receiver maybe this time it can take like 3 minutes instead of two days because we've given them the tools. So I think part of this is giving them the tools.

So I'm actually all for it. I don't get invited to crypto parties, but you know, >> Habachi provable. Trade pers with speed and security. Earn rewards. Visit hibbachi.xyz. Trading on fire. The future runs on intelligence creativity engineering health, money, productivity, AI promised utopia, but delivered only hype. Blackbox models, and zero accountability. With tons of tools claiming to be the best, how do you know what's real? Introducing Recall Find top models ranked by transparent reputation from researchers, users, and developers. Test AI skills, curate favorites, and compete to see what works. Don't guess what's

good, recall it. So, so it's almost like how uh Ethereum came on and took the idea of Bitcoin, which and kind of made it programmable. We're basically looking at the payments landscape of stable coins and payments as they exist in like any any blockchain today and almost being like okay here's the tools that we have presenting this to you know the parties interested and then maybe thinking about like a programmable refund capability or a pro a programmable verification of a of a sender and a recipient uh rather than like doing like a chargebacks. So it's almost it's like creating that same level of interoperability that you would expect from Swift but just doing it in like blockchain infrastructure um to

create this kind of like interoperable functionality. >> Yeah, this is like you know Visa and Mastercard have their own rule book of how you can get you know a refund right? Uh Swift has their own rule book. Pix by the way has one as well as well as pay as well as everyone. this is how payment systems need to work because sometimes people make mistakes. It's fine. The fact we're introducing this to the blockchain doesn't mean that we're destroying blockchains. We can still have distributed ways to to to make decisions that prevent centralization uh if we want to, right? But it doesn't mean that we don't need to provide the right tools to build a reliable system.

>> Yeah, >> that's my that's my point. So, we're deeply in this neo bank meta is what I'm going to call it today, which is I'm a crypto company. I create a phone app. I allow people to earn yield on stables. I allow people to send stables and do form of lending in the app. Give cash back on a card. Have onetenth of the margins of of a traditional bank or if you look at it the other way, 90% better. uh 247 settlement. Stable coins with instant uh transactions and free payments. And we're putting this on an easy ass app.

You're just going to open it every day and you're not going to use your bank account anymore. And you can use the card to spend. And you just got to be topping up your Bitcoin or your ETH and then borrow against it. Get that money to spend. You don't have to sell your crypto and all of a sudden you're just completely outside of having a full credit card. You're pretty much there. >> This is a business that could explode. What's your what's your read on this? >> So, first of all, that sounds like um you know, wirex, cocoa, dollar app, cheaper cash, sinko, like a lot of other a lot of apps that are trying to make in a way revolute, right? Yeah.

>> That is that is trying to do this. the you know the the the reality is and this is interesting there was the first wave of fintex that obviously were built on top of banks but they gave you a better interface to that what we all experienced as you know like a horrible experience right and then these fintexs are now sort of being disrupted by this as you're calling it the neo wave of fintex right neointex because these fintex like u you know have been around for like 10 to 15 years so if they've built things the certain way with licensing on banks as they were required. Now they need to make this infrastructure jump into the next generation. Some are going to make it, some are not. So some fintex will evolve probably into these neointex uh you know

I think revolute has done that jump of creating their own like um exchange eventually right and a lot of that those things Robin Hood you can say with tokenizing stocks they definitely made that jump and and some probably won't right yeah uh so that would be an interesting play to see what's happening there >> yeah that is yeah I mean I think it's going to be hard for some of them to adjust to the real- time nature of blockchain and just the technical shift But the advantage is, you know, I think of like Etherfy or Plasma with their Plasma One thing that they've recently announced or even, you know, some of the work that, you know, you you could see on Stripe's Tempo Chain or um you know, these types of things. And sure, some you know, like Robin Hood or or Revolute

might take a while to figure it all out, but they have like, you know, a quarter billion customers ready to use anything at any given moment on that day. Whereas like you know plasma etherfy are looking over their shoulder at like all right we got like you know 250 rich crypto dgens who are going to spend some money because they're rich. We do we even need to target that that that base is is another interesting question actually. >> Yeah I well I have to ask you a question. Do you do you think just based on what you said, do you think that when Tempo comes out like 6 months after, do you think that um companies who are not Stripe who are not Stripe's customers, what do you think would be the usage?

Would other payment companies adopt this as well? That's what I'm like wondering recently. >> Yeah. or what? Or like even if it's better, would they be would their incentives be aligned in such a way that it would make it it would harm them to even use it, right? And so I think like if they're seeing Stripe as a direct competitor to what they're doing, which they likely would, then I would think that they wouldn't use it. And then I think that they would just probably fork it or adopt it or or adopt a similar version of it. It's very, it's hard to see Stripe coming out with a bang on this and then other payment companies just being like, we're going to concede because Stripe is the best blockchain ever. Tempo is the best L1. We're just going to use Tempo. I just feel like,

you know, insert payment company here would just be like, okay, well, if they can do it, we we, you know, we'll just do it. So, >> yeah. No, it's interesting because in a way, you know, Stripe isn't Tempo, Tempo isn't Stripe, but because it felt like, you know, there were obviously a big part of the announcement. It felt like it is, but maybe Tempo will end up being like this really amazing chain. And yes, Stripe is an investor, but maybe that's it. Maybe, by the way, we'll we'll see more payment companies investing in Tempo, and that could be interesting. Like, maybe they'll create that. Anyway, I'm sorry. I >> John Pok's tweet from Mike Dudas about this. Um he said um it's kind of like a a funny like meme tweet, but it was like um

something about Bridge and Privy. Basically like um the like oh here Stripe buying Bridge and Privy for $1.5 billion total is going to look like Instagram level theft in in a few years. Do you buy it or cop or drop that? What do you think? >> I I agree 100%. Honestly, it's actually a really good comparison. >> I mean, it's uh it's definely a Yeah, it's definitely a a steal. Just a matter of like what kind of return could you expect on that? But I suppose if Tempo becomes the a one of the largest payments chains, then acquiring bridge and privy for $ 1.5 billion is going to

look like pennies compared to their total tempo token allocation or equity. I mean it's not just just that like if bridge is making and I don't remember um if if they ever actually showed the numbers other than in certain events but you know let's assume it's making u $500 million half a billion dollars um in Ebida or then if if that move eventually allows them to be the first mover in stable coins AI agentic which by the way go to every AI marketplace there's a stripe module there already >> right >> if they are able to capture that >> just think about what happened in AI

recently in the last 18 months and what's the revenue of of um of of uh open AI what's the revenue of entropic right if you think about that if you think about if those on top of those platforms there will be even more value created which stripe can actually connect to as a processor and put their chain on and use stable coins to do that because this whole AI world will run on stable coins 100%. Right. For sure. Then >> then yeah, maybe that could be like a another Stripe was actually created just by acquiring those two companies, right?

Like a a cryptobased Stripe was added. >> Anyway, I want to drill down a bit on this X42 thing. Um, we didn't have it necessarily prepped, but just going to read you something. Basically, back in the 1990s, web architects reserve HTTP status code 402 for quote unquote payment required, but traditional payment systems like credit cards prove too slow and expensive for microtransactions and you know, insert blockchains. So, Coinbase comes out in May saying X42 resurrects this dormant standard. It lets websites flag premium content during HTTP requests. When you or your AI agent hits paywalled content, the browser automatically handles a

crypto micro payment and unlocks access instantly. No redirects, no login. It's built for chains on Ethereum. X42 enables transactions as small as a fraction of a cent transferring the web into a kind of pay peruse marketplace. And you know, then there's also kind of the ERC 80004, a universal standard for agents to discover services, identities, and transact. Each agent gets a blockchain passport quoteunquote for you know reputational checks and this is should extend agent to agent P2P uh kind of usage. So that is what is happening and it sounds like this is probably the preface for cloud fair's announcement

like stable coins later that was came about three months later. Um, I just wanted to to just flag that, make sure that the audience gets to understand that. Um, and just give you a chance to kind of sound off on this. I I know we touched on a bit, but maybe just give us the the fireworks or or the fireblocks uh roadmap for aentic payments and how you guys are thinking about integrating them. >> So, first of all, I have to respond about that, you know, um, HTP 42 status codes thing that, uh, that that Coinbase released. I think I think it was a really sad moment for me because I was you know these moments when you think how the hell didn't I think of that >> like that was like that's really good

>> it was obvious >> I was like looking at this and I like I should have thought about that those status codes a lot of people anyway that's good so you know I don't know if it will catch or not but I was thinking to myself that is something I can work with um and by the Uh Brian Armstrong is uh is in Israel next week. I'll if I'll see him, I'll definitely tag him on this one. >> But uh I thought to myself that could work. The Cloudflare thing then I was like, "Okay, that's interesting." And then I started seeing more people sort of riffing on that. So I think that will like >> that's good. That's a good start. The reality is um you know that that's still not a solved problem. Just the fact that

they, you know, thought about this, which is really cool, still means that everyone needs to implement something to support it. Yes, they're using the HTTP protocol, which means like the network clarity in a way is solved. How do you move the message? You still need to interpret the message, which has been the hard part in you know distributing uh um you know uh these type of protocols. The way we're thinking the other side of your question was how we're thinking about agentic payments. Well, the the way we're sort of we we believe eventually, you know, everyone would need to run a wallet. Our goal in a way is is you know, you can think about us like I would say like the Intel of of security which is like we have this microchip. How do we make it

smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller and make it better better? So, how can we as Fireblocks make the wallets that we create and we've created more than a billion of them, you know, for our customers. How do we make them smaller? So they could be agentic AI size let's call them but also more efficient so they could run even at a faster pace than what they're running right now but still maintain the security and in a way the enterprise uh protection you expect when you use Fireblocks because if you know if Microsoft you know this is a thought experiment will allow every Xbox developer or Xbox box to have like this micro wallet in the box right So they still expect some sort of enterprise

governance and control over that but they still want everyone to have a wallet and those like you know that's like millions tens hundreds of millions of people. So, so that's how we're thinking about how we're making our technology faster, better for that. And we have released like our own MCP server, obviously SDKs to handle like AI. Uh, but I feel like as an industry of crypto and AI, two buzzwords you should not be saying in the same sentence, but we're we're still really at the early days of exploring how the interfaces even look like. So, I think a year from now, I'll be smarter.

today. I can tell you I think everyone's guessing and we're trying to guess as well. >> Yeah. I I gotta ask you, Goldie, before we go, um, you know, rumors on the street is that Fireblocks has a big IPO coming after posting just absolutely crushing revenue numbers quarter over quarter. It's going to be a huge year for the for the guys over there. Got a big smile on your face. >> Yeah. No, I wish. I mean, I'm first of all, I I vote for whoever is is, you know, uh has those rumors and and please talk to me. I have equity. Uh but uh but but but I think, you know, I think this this wave that's happening right now, I think we're still trying to to build

Fireblocks. You know, as I told you, this business could be like 100x bigger. Uh we're still building. Am I Are we ready today to go public? Probably not. Uh, will we ever be public? I don't know. That's up the the market probably eventually. >> I think so. I think so, buddy. >> But but yeah, it's a good time to go public. I I I wish every company going public right now. Best of luck. >> Yeah. Goldie, man, I appreciate your time. Thanks for the segment. It's been uh it's been a good one. And uh I I guess just last thing just to close you out. Um, I didn't I didn't really get to mention much about any of the work that you're doing with Polygon, but they obviously hooked us up on the uh appearance today. Maybe you can just give us a little tease as to what you

guys are doing together. >> Yeah, so first of all, you know, Polygon is one of those chains that have we've been partnering with very early on. The the reason behind this is that they're not just thinking about, oh, okay, how can we support the latest fad, whatever that is. They're actually they've been building payment related protocols for the last I think four years. And what we've been working with Polygon on is mainly how are we bringing more payments businesses online? What does it take behind the scenes at the protocol level to do it at the liquidity level? And they just been a great partners for you know actually bringing uh you know bringing more businesses on chain probably than a lot of other blockchains. So super helpful in that.

Thank you by the way Polygon if you're listening. Yeah, thanks Goldie, man. I appreciate your time. Uh, very insightful and and I enjoy it. I feel like, uh, I learned quite a bit just about generally how this payments, you know, kind of landscape is actually panning out. It's it's unsexy. It's really not that appealing to people, but it's really the most important thing that's happening in crypto right now. So, it's funny how these paradoxes of uh industry maturation happen and everyone's focused on whatever like the latest freaking plasma memecoin is or whatever the yield farm is or the NFT hyperlquid drop and it's like no no we're actually doing crossber remittances at scale right now like it's happening. So

>> yeah, we're actually ch we are actually changing the world you know and you didn't think you'll hear that in crypto. So yeah, thank you for having me Andy. This was great. All >> righty man. Thank you.