The New Onchain Economy: Fintechs Expanding Legacy Payments Infra | Money Rails 2025 | Polygon Labs

Transcript

So, uh, yeah, before we dive into stable coins, uh, why don't everyone, uh, introduce themselves really quickly, tell us a little bit about your company, and then, uh, just something to get to know all of you. Um, what's the first thing you do in the morning before a big day uh, in crypto? >> Okay. So, hello guys. Good afternoon. Well, uh, my name is Antonia. I am director of crypto in Latin America at Visa. I think I don't have to explain what Visa does is your our um payments and cards. Um and what I do well we are in a very diff very specific time right now. So first thing check Bitcoin price

[laughter] and then check if the Brazilian regulator sent any new regulation because the last days are >> Yeah, we're gonna need to talk about that afterwards. >> Yes. And you So I'm Ignasio from Lemon Cash. Lemon Cash is a dual wallet is the seamless way to bridge from crypto and also fiat. We're present in seven countries already also integrated Polygon in our ecosystem with more than five million users. And maybe the first thing I do in the morning to to set up my tone on crypto, I usually start seeing trading view maybe the prices, but now I think I'm a bit of a shift right now. This is not the best time to do it. So >> that's probably the healthy thing. I

think a lot of >> Start with yoga maybe or something more more relaxed man right now. >> Good idea. >> Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. I'm Germo Calves, founder and CEO of El Dorado. We're building a stable coinpowered super app for Latin America. Um I'm originally from Venezuela. I've been working in the crypto space for over 12 years. Started bit mining bitcoins back in 2013. And uh yeah, the first thing I do in the morning before a big crypto day is probably check my whoop to see if I had a good night of sleep and yeah, probably check my emails.

>> Got it. So yeah, this question is for all of you guys. So stable coins have unlocked uh the US dollar and access and inclusion to a lot of users, a lot of companies cross border. Um how are stable coins reshaping the competitive landscape? um and are we watching the rise of fintex that can go global really from day one where uh typically it would be by uh jurisdiction and by country. So I'd love to get all of your input. So guys uh for sure we can say that stablecoin is helping to enable this new way to work for those fintexs. uh the the stable coin technology it's challenging the traditional rails right

so well we are here if you go to the the next the the panel the pavilion the the at here uh we will see several new companies that are starting to work with payments with wallets and uh developing new products into the financial environment that we were not seeing five years ago. So uh stablecoin is leading a new new phase of the environment of the the market and the the natural of the the natural of the the technology is the the main responsible for it.

>> So I think the landscape right now the main thing that is changing is of course in time to market right. So fintex like us for example five years ago we had the challenge for example to launch a visa prepay card or something like that and it took us maybe almost one year to launch that you know so first of all the first phase that we are seeing is in terms of time to market is much more efficient. So companies fintex different projects they can launch maybe in one month and they can have all the capacities and capabilities that it took us maybe all of these years to get to where we are right now they can launch it maybe in one month. Then of course a second part of this Sam is that mainly use cases and also solving problems of fintex that all right now in now

nowadays it's every every time present you know so people having trouble to bring their money from abroad so right now it's a commodity that every single player that has it so all these type of solutions right now they're really adopted and this is like a new fintech landscape that you are seeing right now >> Jeremo >> yeah I actually have to agree with uh Ignasio on this one um a A few years ago, building a fintech was a better solution than than building a bank. Uh fintech is kind of like a regulatory arbitrage from from from a bank. But I think that onchain products are also a regulatory arbitrage from building a fintech. So one of the underappreciated aspects of building a onchain first

experience today is that the whole technology stack is actually getting quite commoditized and I don't think this is a bad thing at all today. If you have Fireblocks, bridge, uh maybe rain cards powered by Visa and so on, you can get a very neat onchain banking experience. And maybe there are some developers in Nairobi or in in in other cities in in Africa, Latin America and other emerging countries of the world that can build a a pretty lowcost uh neo banking experience. And I think that that's one of the huge advantages that we are going to have if we want to solve

this uh underbank and unbanked uh issue and and be able to accelerate uh GDP growth for uh the emerging markets of the world. >> So you mentioned uh commoditization of some onchain products. You mentioned problems you're solving um for Ignasio GMO. I'd love to get an understanding of some of the problems that you guys are solving for both B2B and B TOC customers today. Um, and just tell us a little bit maybe about the point of differentiation for you guys with solving some of these problems.

>> So some problems already what we're talking before maybe the first ones that we started to see almost two years ago. First case was these remittancies type of products that we needed to build for our users. We are very focused on the VOCC segment for the retail user. So we were having for example a lot of people having their money on pay platforms like PayPal and so on. They need have like an easy solution to bring that money here to Argentina or countries from Latin America. Right now there's like a commodity solution that every single fintech and also player they can plug it in maybe in one month or very very easy.

So those was that was one of the main problems that we had. Making payments in a crossber type of fashion as well was another one. So right now for example infrastructure that is built on polygon right that an Argentinian can travel to Brazil they can do a payment with Argentinian pesos through the pix infrastructure. So those are the type let's say of we we see the crypto a lot right like these legos that we see on payments and also on infrastructures they're working a lot and they actually solve real problems from the users. >> It's amazing. Yeah, on on my side, I'm I'm originally from Venezuela, so I'm a hyperinflationary soil there. But aside from that, um hyperinflation forced 7 million of Venezuelans to move out of

our home country. And one of the uh issues that we started seeing is that it was very very difficult for Venezuelans and also for uh millions of Latinos all over the world to send money back home. There are 65 million Latinos living in the US alone. So the opportunity gap for building uh very simple crossber payment solutions and remittance solutions is huge. So we are targeting some of those uh crossber corridors especially for uh migrants uh for freelancers and so on.

And more recently on the B2B side, we have uh seen the appearance of some other use cases that uh a few years before were untapped, things like imports and exports. We have a a company from from Bolivia who's actually doing um exports of textiles to uh Argentina. So when we were like chatting with some of our customers, we were very very impressed that this uh Bolivian company very uh very traditional company, nothing to do with technology at all, was uh leveraging El Dorado to move uh Bolivianos to USCT and then USCT to Argentine pesos back and forth. So I was

very very impressed and touched uh by that and I think that those are the use cases that we're building for. These guys are changing the world. Over to Visa. So, uh, we know Visa has experimented a lot with USDC settlements. Um, would love to get an understanding from your perspective how you guys see yourselves integrating USDC and stable coins um at scale and maybe some of the partners or the pilots or the use cases outside of settlements including settlements that you guys are seeing traction in. Well, I think that is important to say that Visa is working with crypto since 2015 at least. So although stable coin is hype right now, we not started to work

with crypto right now. So and we understand that that once we started to work with crypto so many years ago, we have a relationship and we understand how the crypto environment work and the other side we still understand a lot the traditional market. We have been working with them for over 70 years. So what we are doing right now is being that bridge that is connecting the crypto environment with the traditional. We we must to be honest the user experience in crypto was not the the the best one in the last years and we are trying to get our products like a Visa card to enable

that any crypto user can spend their crypto in the same way that they are already used to using a Visa card in any one of one ours uh 150 merchants around the world. So this is one way that Visa is approaching this stable coins connection. So we we are connecting we are linking a a traditional card Visa to your wallet. Another way in and that and and on that way we are helping the >> on polygon >> soon. [laughter] Uh and the other way and by doing that we are for sure helping our users. So you you now can use your crypto to pay to buy a McDonald's to to spend whatever

you want. On the other way, we need to help the issuers and the acquirers because if you are dealing with crypto, you you don't have to change convert the from crypto to to fiat in order to settle your obligations. So we are enabling the the possibility to sell the obligations with Visa with stable coins. Uh we just launched four stable coins that are enabling that are possible to sell with Visa ju not just for the issuers but for acquireers to end this would help the those issuers and acquireers to sell up to seven days a week. That is something that in the traditional way we can do and we know that for the traditional market this even if we we give we gave everything

there is some difficult parts on the the technology on the infrastructure that the market is not ready yet and for that we are doing some kind of partnerships so partnerships like rain that um in asum shared um rain um partnerships with bridge with banks that are partners that are helping us to to bring those products in an easier way for the market. So at Visa the just to to have in mind uh we are at several over $250 million in stable coins and these are numbers that are not updated because this year this number will be much higher. So this is something that's

already a reality and we are getting the retail to use stable coin on a daily basis. settlements seven days a week. That is bullish. Um >> just just to add a point uh I was in a meeting yesterday uh analyzing how the the settlements in stable coin would impact at least for example the acquired in Argentina and when we are offering the settlements in stable coin for acquirers we are saying that they will be able to have at least onethird of the year in money beh daily because uh you have the Sundays and Mondays and you have the

holiday holidays and in Argentina for example you have I think um 19 holidays a year so that's the power of money that we are giving to our customers that are helping them to use that money or to to sell to to to use that as a new source of revenue or to use as floating and get more money. Amazing. So, what I'm hearing is uh there's still a little bit of fragmentation in the user experience. Over to you guys. I'm just uh curious how you guys think about user experience. I know at Polygon we think about uh people say DeFi mullet, but a lot of us try to think about supercharging fiat rail. So, on the back back end and stable coin rails, front

end, very familiar experiences. Curious as you're designing your user experiences, how are you thinking about it um both today and long term? So in our case Sam I think the main challenge was to how to make crypto and also make it in in a seamless way as possible you know try not to mention terms like crypto using those type of words. So in lemon we had to acrewue actually new terms right like the digital dollar for example or start to create new concepts for the users in order to on board them as easy in the easiest way possible right so as not to create an entry barrier for them in the first phase so that's actually something we had to work on a lot then in how do we build our products we see that in

this case stable coins we often think of them as a compliment right so we are very aware that our users in the case of consumers of course they They still use fiat, right? They will they will keep using fiat. They earn their wages on fiat. They transact money with the relatives or friends on fiat, right? They're going to keep using the traditional financial system. So the way we think all the products and also the user experience is to build compliments, right? So you can do this with fiat. Okay, you can do it as well with crypto or stable coins. You can do a remittance for example with crypto as well or either with on banking sending US dollars right from your bank account.

you can receive them maybe on UCCC on the platform. These are the type of concepts that we are trying to build and actually they're doing really good as well. >> Jerem over to you. >> Yeah, one of the main challenges on the on the payment side on the TRA file payment side is that we have a region with dozens and dozens of countries with different financial systems, many of them isolated from each other. So it's nearly impossible to send a banking transfer from a bank in Colombia to a bank in Brazil and then to a bank in Argentina instantly and for a um for a low cost. So I think that the rise of realtime payment systems is is really making a difference. Argentina has been

promoting this for for quite some time with uh CVU transfers and and we have seen the rise of peaks in Brazil, the biggest or one of the biggest real-time payment systems in the world and and a fantastic uh example for for the rest of the emerging markets. So I think that what we're lacking is full interperability among all these uh local real-time payment systems across our region. So, one of the cool things that we're doing at El Dorado is that we're leveraging uh local uh stable coin liquidity, mostly USDT liquidity with this real-time payment systems on all these countries to be able to do uh like cross cross uh country swaps like I have

uh Colombian pesos, but I need to uh my family needs to receive uh Bolivian Bolivianos in in in Bolivia. Uh, but I don't care if I'm using USDT liquidity, peer-to-peer market, uh, market makers, uh, Polygon, whatever other, uh, chain in the back end. So, >> they care about Polygon stock. >> They only they only care about about what they're receiving on the other side of the equation. So, we try to make sure that we uh make that experience as seamless as possible. We're actually working on a product that we're calling internally fiat to fiat. I know it's a horrible name for a for a crypto product. We're not we're part of the we

need to fix that on our industry, but I think that's that's one of the things that we need to accomplish like abstracting everything uh to the user so uh we can make the experience as seamless as possible and as interoperable as possible. >> Cool. We're going to wrap up with this question. So this is for all of you. Next three to five years, what are you most excited about in the space? Or just maybe give us a bold prediction um of things that you're excited about over the next three to five years in the space.

>> I can start. So something that excites me a lot also Gisha here gave a hint already in the next three or five years it was we're going to start to see more interpretability among the the infrastructure for payments as Gisha was saying well the Brazilian case of course is the example but we're already seeing it in Peru right now in in our platform this is already happening too we're seeing in Colombia right now with the bre interoperability system so those sort of stuff actually let us keep on building also offering ing good solutions for the users get us as well creative right to give new challenges to us. So that excites me a lot in the short term.

Well, I I used to say that we know that we win the market when the people stop to talk about the technology and they just use maybe three to five years is feel. We need a little more but I would like to see a a more um used users to to use our uh the technology our product uh and less times like that to where you have to explain and more hey you you don't have to explain because the the use the the necessity that that solution is solving is so powerful that you only know that

this is better for example you don't have to explain peaks for Brazilians they know why that is a powerful solution so my my expectation is that we will achieve that that patterns >> I agree So yeah, I would say that I mean it it's not really a bold prediction if it's consensual. So uh stable coins are already uh on a similar uh pace to to Visa. So that that that's not even like a bold prediction. So I think like like a bold prediction for the next three to five years is that the whole financial ecosystem it's going to be fully built on chain and fully built on stable coin

rail. So I'm very very excited to see the next fintech companies being built on directly on stablecoin rail. So I want to see buy now pay later solutions uh mortgage mortgage back loans uh fully built on chain uh under collateral collateralized uh lending uh protocols uh a stable coin embedded marketplaces. So I think that those are the missing pieces for the whole equation. And of course AI agents are going to be a huge part of the this equation in order to make all these processes way more automated and and way more efficient

than today. >> And for those who want to do this, you can use Visa tokenized asset platform that's use designed to programmable finance. >> Banks are already starting to do this on Polygon. So we'll leave it at that. Time's up, guys. It was great uh hanging out with you guys. Great conversation.