Stablecoins and Onchain Money: From Utility to Ubiquity | Money Rails 2025 | Polygon Labs

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I am Jacqueline Malnik. I'm the founder and CEO of Token Relations. We do a weekly newsletter on Polygon. You guys should all read it. Check it out. But more importantly, I am joined here today with Will Duran, the co-CEO of MTIO. We have Christian, the founder of Lyio. And then we have Efron Barza, the Latam lead at Tether. >> Hey guys, how are you feeling? >> Excited to talk stable coins today? Yeah. Mic test. Mic test. >> Frank, hello. Can you hear me? >> Hello. Yes, we could we could hear all of you guys now. Awesome. All right, let's start talking about everyone's favorite topic right now, stable coins.

>> It is probably the biggest narrative of the past 12 to 18 months. Uh, Tether is the world's largest stable coin, so I'm sure you've got lots to say over there. Um, but essentially, it's kind of becoming this like backbone of onchain finance, payments, DeFi, all these different areas. To kind of lay the land, how do you think about the state of stable coins today? Are you guys happy with it? Do you feel like we're in the early days? Where are we? >> Go ahead. >> You want me to start? Okay. Hey, everybody. Yeah. So, I'm the CEO of Ldio and we've been foreseeing this wave for the past eight years. My previous startup, we did remittances from Columbia to Venezuela. We tried to dollarize Venezuela back in 2018 2020.

But it was a timing thing where we that's why we didn't succeed. But with LTO basically we're building a global account where every person in the their day today they can spend they can invest they can basically transact have a account in the US building like this stable coin banking trend that we are seeing right now but we've been foreseeing it in the past yeah five to six years so regarding on what's happening with stable coins in this moment I think there's a lot like the industry is pretty hot but the key for us and what we've always seen is Stable coins is just like the bay coin.

So the seamless adoption for the users is something that's the most important thing for stable coins because people they don't want crypto. They just need to solve the problems and stable coin coins has been that vehicle where basically people can send cheaper faster they can access to strong currencies and more in emerging markets. We operate in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Argentina and this is a strong problem that happens as well in Latam in Africa. Everybody I think here knows it. But it's the seamless adoption that the key because when people they want to spend they don't care if it's a stable coin.

They just want to buy like uh they do they just want to do a transaction without high fees. They want to hedge from devaluation. They want to generate yield. So the key and what we've seen is basically in how people are adopting it seamlessly and that's what we've been building towards in the past four years with lithium. >> Hi guys. Uh my name is William um founder of Mio. We're stable coins for Latin America. So basically we issue the Colombian pes on chain. Uh we just launched the Brazilian realale. Um I guess my answer to the question would be that it's been interesting to see sort of the evolution of stable coins over the last couple years. Right. I think in many ways it all sort of kicked off uh with the US with Bitfinex, right? It really was this sort of asset that

allowed money to stay on chain. Um I think it's been interesting the last couple years how that's evolved uh to really become sort of this this asset to transact right and I think I think probably when uh when you USDT came out I don't think that was even something that you know they thought about like oh this is going to become this this massive thing but rather you know it was trying to solve a problem right and and and I think what we're seeing now is that you know we're seeing the tokenization of assets come on chain which essentially means you know we need to have uh sort of like this this this assets to be able to to move value. Um, and I think that's what we've seen at least from a local issuance perspective, which is, you know, it's it's if the dollar is on chain, I think it makes

sense that a lot of these other um, you know, that a lot of these other currencies come on chain as well. And that's what MTIO is trying to do uh, from our end. So that's how I actually have seen that that evolution. And I think now there's going to be a lot of companies building um using these sort of like onchain rails. >> Hi guys. Uh Ephrain Efra, it's easier than Ephrain to be honest. Expansion manager for Latin America, Tether. Um so Tether is a Bitcoin first company, right? and um being in the space for the last 10 years and saw a lot of uh evangelists trying to educate people on Bitcoin and blockchain technology. For

us, USDT became the an easier way to educate by using the need the necessity of people to save in dollars to understand the technology and also to jump into other forms of cryptocurrencies. So um I think it's it's needed in my opinion. It's the backbone for a whole ecosystem. It created an industry on its own. What it's lacking in my opinion is a bit more abstraction which is obviously it goes against the philosophy but it needs a bit more abstraction in the solutions to be completely

ubiquity. UPS. That's the thing. >> Yeah. Given that you all have um kind of a unique angle within the Latin American region, how do you kind of think about expansion from stable coins being, you know, a niche asset within the crypto space to actually having utility in people's day-to-day lives? >> Yeah. So, I'll come back maybe a couple of years ago where stable coins that are, for example, it was the main asset to do trading for example in exchanges. That's how you guys want a lot of market cap. But nowadays the real adoption comes from the day-to-day usage. You spending with a Mastercard or with Visa for example, we offer that. You saving

you being able to transact easily. So the key is basically adopting it into the real world problems. And that's what we we've been seeing me as a founder for the past eight years where remittances were broken. They're too expensive. having up to 15% fees sending crosser payments. That's that's absurd. And as well when you basically are trying to use your dollars like my parents for example 30 years ago, they're just stashing dollars in their in their bed because there was no easy access for you to have a USD bank account or a euro account and basically stable coins has been like adopting and giving that financial access to to the people. So that's what I see in like how we should

be thinking more in the user's problem and less in the technology because the technology is the enabler. So we already have it there. How can we build the experience towards what the users really need? And with that basically building and transforming the traditional financial products into more like blockchain and stable coin powered products which are going to be much more efficient, easier, faster and basically better for the users. Just fun a fundamental thing from from our view in lithium. That's why we basically have been building everything towards converting all the traditional financial products into stable coin products so that any user can use them.

>> Yeah. So I mean I think you know I agree with Christian. I think at the end of the day it's about usability, right? So um but in many ways it's also about technology. So I think if you go back a couple years ago um probably the technology wasn't good enough for certain use cases, right? If you look at payments uh even the blockchains were were okay. I mean, I remember the the DeFi summer and and also the NFT craze and it was just like it was absolutely ridiculous that you'd be paying, you know, $300, $400 gas fees for a transaction. But I think that was sort of like the state of of technology then and and and I think at first, uh, with new technologies, a lot of, you know, it's always a lot about hype at first.

Um, I think what we're seeing now is is that there's different players solving a different problem in the stack, right? So like for us as an issuer uh we try to solve a lot of the infrastructure issues around on-ramp off-ramp um you know trust um if you look at lithio for example they try to solve a lot around the user experience right named accounts being able to access a basically like a global bank or like a global global uh account so I think at the end of the day it's about understanding that you know while we still have certain limitations as an industry um if we all sort of like focus on solving specific problems for users. I think that's going to that's going to take the adoption to become

much more much more mainstream. >> Yeah, I agree. Uh no, what I can add there is basically there's a with this technology there's a like a click factor where you the moment you understand this is much better than the traditional financial system to send money abroad basically. So um for me at least was comparing one to the other and not coming back never again. Erh and I think that level of or that that situation for most users is when uh we gain that moment in which in which we can basically connect the traditional financial system with this new financial

system to allow people easily to understand that this is much better than the previous the process. kind of to your point before about your parents stashing money under the bed. Do they use stable coins now? >> Absolutely. >> Okay. Yeah. Because I was going to say like abstracting away the crypto complexity of all this is kind of like the key objective because in order to get everyone to adopt it, you don't want them all to be sitting in an Ethereum conference in order to understand how to use it. You just want them to be able to like log on and transact, right? Yeah. >> Yeah. I wanted I wanted to add something there which is actually a cool story which is same thing with my mother. Uh she she honestly I I think she's just starting to understand what I do. But the first time she really understood

what I did was actually at a at a at a taco shop in Bogota in Colombia. Um and then you know LTO is is is we're partners right? So we're you know they're clients of ours and and I took out the Lethio card and I paid you know I told her like hey like pay for the food. Um and to her it was like oh wow like I understand now how you guys work with them because then she saw the settlement on like you know cop cop uh and and that's why you know my previous point was like you need to build on the different levels of the stack right like for us we're building on the infrastructure layer but if you also don't have that application layer it's very hard for these things to come mainstream so that that that's why it's a good story

>> that's a good testimonial for you yeah >> yeah absolutely and like we we we have scaled to hundreds of thousands of users in the past four years and the strategy I remember when we started in 20 back in 2021 2022 it was we could have done a like decentralized wallet or giving the people to their keys or going with crypto and some competitors they started as like full cryptonative but we understood that the users are the common people like if there's a crypto user it's a really small niche a.5% of the population if you we really want to scale a seamless adoption in in crypto and and generate volume. We have to get to the end user. And how did we do it? It was

full focus in user experience so that even your mother or my mother that she's 65 years old, she's super tech tech ignorant. She would hate me if she hears me, but basically is how they can use it in their day-to-day without needing to understand what's blockchain. It's like pretty similar to the internet 30 years ago. like not many people understand how the internet works from from the infrastructure perspective. They just use it every day in their phones, in their meetings and everything. I think stable coins the key of that is giving the product to the user so that they can basically solve their problems. Sorry if I'm being repetitive, but that's what we focus and we've been obsessed with in the past couple of years. And that basically has buil made us build the

card so that anybody can buy something, have an a account in the US so that they can transact, bring their salary or do a remittance or whatever. And that's how we basically keep on developing. I think that's the key for stable coin adoption in the in the short term. But I think Efine can tell us more. >> I agree, but I'm trying to go back to the philosophy basically. So I understand it's a it's the first step but it would be awesome if many people even your mother 65 years old mine 70 right at least understand how not how blockchain technically works but they that they can check basically and they don't have to trust a company and they can trust directly in math and in the

public infrastructure. That's why we recently launched the wallet development kit for from Tether which basically allows anyone it's open source anyone to basically download it and start creating onchain wallets uh for everyone. >> Is it better to exist as like an invisible layer where they don't really know what they're using? It just makes their lives easier or should they be learning and understanding what this technology is hopefully meeting them where they're at? I mean the the the the good question is like how many people know uh you know like what JavaScript is, what language um you know Instagram uses, these type of things. So I I

honestly I I don't think so. I don't think you need that for mass adoption. I think I think you need to understand sort of like major bullet points around what it solves and what it does. But I think at the end of the day um the world is so complex that like it's very hard to understand how everything works, right? like I I I so so so I just I just think you need to be able to push forward like the use cases. Um and then it sort of clicks in people's minds and and I think that's really how you drive that type of adoption. >> But it's like we know what dollars are but I don't need to know like how my credit card transacts or like settles. I just know that it works, right? So would stable coins be comparable to like everyday currencies that we use?

>> It's a tricky question. Because even you even if you know what a dollar is, you're trusting the issuer, right? And the issuer in this case, well, it's the Federal Reserve. In Argentina, it's a central bank, but in this case, we are a private company. So, you will have to rely on us as a private company to secure those assets. So, I'm not saying that we are not, but again, we are still a private company. So, it's it's centralized. Yeah. I don't know if it's going to be the the invisible layer. Uh but for sure based on the premise that everyone should be self-custodian, you should be understanding exactly who is

behind whatever you are using to transact. >> Yeah, I think you mentioned the the word trust and that's the most important thing for you building a fintech and more in emerging economies where there's been a lot of scams in crypto. So understanding basically that there is a stronger fundamental infrastructure than the traditional financial system like if you see swift for example I like everybody has used a swift transaction but I I I'm sure less than 1% of the people understand how it works and it's like something that's been there for decades and super inefficient that's why it's slow that's why it's expensive so understanding like the fundamental thing

that's more technical it's just like how you can leverage on the infra layer into making much better products 10x 100x better products which is happening now. So I think for a user if you understand that hey I don't have to pay 15% on a crossber payment I just will have to pay 1% or 0.5%. and I trust the brand. That's why trust is super important. There's going to be the mass adoption and they're going to be a a really fast switch of usage from try incumbents to new companies like LTIO or any other like similar companies that are uprising etc. So and that's why we've been growing as well so fast. So we we have always tried to be super transparent

with our users to explaining them. And it's like, okay, it's a digital dollar. It's not the fiat dollar, but it's just like a digital dollar is a digitalization of the fiat dollar and it's backed up. So, it's we we've done a lot of education, but the users, they really don't care. It's like, okay, I can spend my my dollars. I can I can put them and generate yield. So, yeah, it's it's difficult to say, but I think it's it's the user don't care. They just care about cheaper, faster, and better products. So obviously education and trust are really important here. Um and they're probably still like a bit of a hurdle for some people. Um because maybe they don't trust it, maybe they don't know enough about it. But what are other kind of hurdles or challenges that each of

you are trying to overcome in order to make this more of like a daily thing that people interact with? >> I think regulate. So assuming we are in the first step which we are basically trying to promote the usage of crypto of uh stable coins through centralized parties right centralized wallets etc. I think a a big responsibility relies on the regulation. If a regulation is bad like for example uh Europe basically it erodess every every innovation that can that you can achieve with the with the solution. Um but that's yeah besides

education I think that's the biggest the biggest problem. >> I mean I would I would echo what Christian said earlier. I think trust right I mean trust continues to be even though I think we've advanced a lot in the last couple years as a whole in the industry I think trust is still the main one right trust from banks trust from consumers um so I think at the end of the day the you know the way you get trust is a little bit whatever said I mean I think at the end of the day regulation does give this clarity uh to banks in institutions even to to people uh to feel more comfortable sort of like navigating uh these assets and then on the other side I think user experience right I think if you have sort of like clear

regulation and you have an improvement in user experience uh you you know you really do get to this sort of like mass adoption uh but for us I think a lot of it is still continuing to build trust with like the major stakeholders in the space >> you you agree with them yeah I thought so [laughter] um okay maybe on the the positive side of things then how do you think about what's really working well today because obviously something's working well. Stable coins are growing. The adoption is massive. I talked about this at the beginning of this panel saying like it is the hottest narrative right now and for good reason. I think people are starting to see the value of it. But is there a specific area whether it's like payments uh remittances uh something

within DeFi whatever it may be you might all have different answers but where are you seeing the most traction and success today? I think it's a compounded effect for the past couple of years. Companies like Tether, MOO, they have been able to basically offer and connect the rails and provide liquidity. I think that's something super important globally and as well locally. So I I think of timing is like if LTO would have been born 10 years ago, it wasn't it wouldn't have been possible. So there's a compound effect between the companies that have been already been explaining to authorities. So that the compliance part I think is as well a a crucial part that for example yeah in LATAM in Colombia

for example the compliance is still we we do it as as if we were a traditional bank and we have a super high standard of compliance even though a company like LTIO is not a financial institution. We're just a digital asset marketplace. So I think as well that the companies like us that we go more than expected from from the from the law is where we basically generate that offer confidence from the central bank in Colombia from the from the different institutions and that's how we've been basically been showing up that founders like us we are up to building something with crypto there comes like the success comes from the experience because that makes like if we have the

trust of the government we are able to launch on scale that's the most important thing so building an experience where everybody understands my mother your mother everybody that's the key part and how people basically are going to adopt pretty fast and not only for a stable coin banking but as well for remittances for investments we see real world assets are going to be all tokenized in the next couple of years so as well leveraging into that so that you can jump in and jump out and that's all going to be basically experience experience because right now it's too difficult like if you want to invest in the US for example in interactive brokers you'll take like up to six months opening your account like if you have a a wallet connected to any kind of uh stock market you'll be able

to basically invest instantly so and that's everything experience so the success for example in lithio and one of our mods is how we've been building everything and connecting to DeFi and to all the protocols and bringing it for somebody that is 10 years or 65 cent years old and can use it seamlessly with three clicks. So I think that's one of the key success parts with the trust and the compliance because otherwise it would have been very difficult to scale not being a decentralized company. So that's from my side.

>> Um I would say that there's like a couple things that have gone well you know in the in the last year or so. I think one obviously regulatory clarity in the US around the Genius Act and these type of things. I think really sort of like shakes the market in a way that's positive, right? Um you look at now uh vast licensing coming out in Brazil and and I I think I think what this means that there's there's like this, you know, movement towards like mainstream adoption, right? And and I think uh regulation unlocks a lot of that. So I would say, you know, that's one of the big things this year is is sort of like that unlock of regulatory clarity. Um the second one I would say you know use cases around crossber payments um I think is a big one right I

think for many years crypto in many ways has been trying to find its feet around sustainable uh you know large use cases we've always had use cases right but it's always been sort of like specific use cases that cater to to to specific niche of people I think crossber is is something that we've seen that unlocks entire regions around the world right you look at Africa You look at Southeast Asia, you look at Latin America, uh, and all of a sudden you realize like there's a lot of efficiencies that that can be solved through stable coins, right? So it's it's this type of thing where like, okay, now we have a little bit of more regulatory clarity and a regulatory push from the US that has this sort of like drop down effect. Now you have, you know, all these companies going into

payments and using stable coins to solve uh, payment issues globally. and then all of a sudden it starts to feel like there's there's real movement, there's real things happening. Um, and I think that's just going to lead to more onlocks um, you know, in different verticals um, over the next couple months. So, so I would say those are sort of like the the things that to me are most interesting in the last couple months. >> Yeah, I agree. I think No. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I think the more the more the more and more erh business models become online, right? and and internet native it's logic that you you start using uh internet money right it's it's a matter of time that's it but yeah for sure and

I personally thank the pandemic also because we were [laughter] not be here without the pandemic the pandemic created basically that a lot of people start moving on online for all their businesses and that created a huge demand for stable coins for sure >> from your experiences in Latin America. Is there any specific types of adoption that you've seen that are extremely unique to this region opposed to other ones like Latin America, South America, etc.

>> Um, yeah. So, I think there's a I mean, so like okay, I mentioned cross border, cross border is, you know, obviously uh sort of like a worldwide use case, but I think one of the things that we found interesting in LATAM um is that obviously each country has very specific needs, right? So um I'll use the example of Colombia because that's the you know first market that we launched in and I think you know we sort of went in thinking okay we're going to do like onchain effects but over the last couple months we've been evolving that vision and like one of the things that we realized that for example local payments treasury management these type of things are are big use cases too uh because for example Colombia we have like a payments right there's no realtime payments just

now there's starting to be you know this this sort of launch of a of a of a of a real-time payment system, but it's still in its infancy and there's still things that you know use cases and business cases that it doesn't fully cover. So, I think it's it is interesting because you start seeing that um depending on the country there might or might not be specific needs. So, in Colombia definitely I think local payments and local treasury management is a big one. Um Brazil probably not so much, right? They have pics so local payments just feels a little bit far-fetched. Um so I think that's why it's sort of difficult to generalize LATAM as a whole because it does feel like a region. We all speak the same language apart from Brazil but but at the end of the day uh each country has very different sets of

regulation of compliance culture uh payment rails. So I I I think that's that's why it's so hard to sort of like standardize these type of things. >> Yeah. So in my take is like yeah everybody sees Latam as like one region but every country has its own things like like will was saying. So I've seen like and going in trying to figure out what's the best goto market for each of the different countries what countries to go. I've been analyzing pretty deep Latin America. So I see a different split. So Central America obviously crossber payments close to 30% of the GDP of some countries come from remittances. So that's a perfect product where you can launch there are countries

for example like Ecuador or Brazil where when you are spending with your local card in an international and do an international transaction you'll get fees up to 5 to 10% and that's absurd. So as well the way how you spend but as well for example Venezuela Argentina Colombia where people just saw the dollar as a store of value or a or a stronger fiat euro dollar is where people as well start saving. Obviously, it's a mix because they overlap and all the countries suffer similar things because of the geopolitical conflicts, the macroeconomical trends, everything that's been happening for the past decades and it's not getting any any better. So, but we see the whole time shifts. So, right now in some countries there's the extreme left. In others is

the extreme right and it will be changing like over the periods. So there are many opportunities and what we see is like those are tailwinds a lot of uncertainty a lot of uh devaluation a lot a lot of opportunities and that's why it's the sweet spot where stable coins in the world are more adopting that's why LATAM is the strongest market but you have to understand like okay what's Bolivia's stake what's the problems that they're facing what are the regulations like July of last year there was a regulation that left the that that permitted the banks to use crypto in Bolivia and that's why there were many companies stacking Meu launching in Bolivia and getting a lot of adoption. So I think it's everything's evolving pretty fast. You have to be like understanding the market

and knowing that the same product that works in Colombia might not work in Paraguay in Argentina and being like super flexible. But the whole suit of products, people spending, saving, investing and transacting, sending money like everybody needs it. The pro the question is how you get into market. What advice would you give builders that are looking to build products or something within the stable coin economy right now? >> Yeah. So, I would say um you know I think there's still a lot of uh sort of like consumer products that need to be built. There's there's a lot basically there's one of the one of the

ways that we think about this is like there's a lot of infrastructure that's already sort of in place, right? So if you look at for example I don't know BitGo and you look at Tether and you look at Mintio with you know local stable coins uh you look at rain cards you look at all these different things it's actually quite cool because right now you could literally you know put some of these pieces together and and sort of have like a neo bank right which is kind of crazy to think about 10 years ago that you'd be able to do these type of things and and and and that's just like one example right but there's so many different types of product credit products lending products. Um, we actually have a term in Minio that we we we use which is finchain which is like,

you know, fintex building on onchain infrastructure. Uh, and I think that's sort of like what it alludes to. It's that there's just so many onchain capabilities now um that we can use to really bring a better user experience. Like we've always thought about the fact that there's just not enough financial products in LATAM. Like if you look at the US, you have a bunch of things. you have like you know Robin Hood and Coinbase and and it's it's been like that for many years. Uh that's not really been the case in LA time where we basically have like new bank um and and I think it's because of the complexity of building financial products which I think should change with all this sort of like new tooling that we have at our disposal.

Um I would say there's still a lot of room to grow this industry right because basically we are challenging the traditional financial system and all their products. So I think focus on the on what the what's the problem you want to solve first and try to focus the product that that way and see if fits and then the rest is just history because this industry goes up and down up and down up and down. When it's up and you're ready to launch it's going to be easy.

>> Yeah. From my perspective is like in the past four years we've been the design partners for many companies for example bridge with polygon we've worked a lot as well with stellar avalanche with mo we are also design partnersh we understand pretty well and they have been solving our needs so people who want to start building I think the two main things for now is one local rails having directly that's what I was telling you before the panel is having the way into how you can connect locally instantly easier is something that I think is a huge opportunity because there's no global partner that has all the railways. So for us it has been pretty difficult to understand okay if we integrate this partner then we're going to let the other countries away

and I think that's a huge opportunity and the other one as well is ge generation and how people and companies can as well have a secure way. use open trade. They're our partners and they're great partners. I think there's still a huge opportunity there in the market even though they're creating great solutions, but I think those would do would be two interesting things with all the wave of companies that are operating with stable coins. >> Amazing. Well, thank you to our panelists for all the wonderful insights and thank you to everyone for listening in. >> Thank you guys. Thank you.