Stripe: The Stablecoin (R)Evolution - John Egan. Ep. 606

Transcript

Stripe was one of these things that's very obvious looking back, you know, but at the time sort of took a bit of a a zoomed out requirement, I think, to come up with. Stripe historically has thought about here are all of these really complicated, difficult financial systems that have built for all sorts of probably justifiable reasons, you know, and here's kind of a a simple API to go and interact with them, you know, and then kind of here comes crypto and and now sort of stable coins specifically and just said, well, let's forget about all of that, right? What if we just rebuilt it from first principles to be digital money? And I think that that's that's really kind of a good capture is Stripe has been this for the traditional finance world, which is what really makes us so well positioned to also be

this for this new world that's coming today. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I am Fedrica Anst and today I'm speaking with John Egan who is the head of crypto at Stripe. Stripe of course builds payments payment infrastructure for the internet um and is one of the most valuable fintexs worldwide. Before I talk with John, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Chorus 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Panta Capital, and Ledger trust Chorus one with their assets. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in

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They're building a more resilient privacy focused internet. If you're looking for an L1 to launch your project, Nosis Chain offers the same development environment as Ethereum with lower transaction fees. It's supported by over 200,000 validators, making Nosis chain a reliable and credibly neutral foundation for your applications. Nosis DAO drives Nosis governance where every voice matters. Join the Nosis community in the Nosis DAO forum today. Deploy on the EVM compatible Nosis chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at nosis.io. IO. Hey John, thank you so

much for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me. I know you are currently on Stripe Tour. Um, where are you calling in from? I'm calling in from New York today, which is where a good chunk of the Stripe crypto team is actually based. But pretty soon we'll actually be out in Berlin doing uh that segment of Stripe Tour and then really all over the world for the rest of the year all the way up until um the New York tour which happens in uh in November. So big big moment for Stripe to go around and really reach out and interact with merchants and sort of explain the new features mostly that we launched at sessions um and to go deep. So you know really really excited to do it and it's going to be it's going to be a packed schedule. Super cool. Maybe before we

dive into um Stripe and Web 3 um tell us a bit about yourself and kind of like where your career took you so far. I know kind of you were previously at at Facebook and also at uh early startups some of which you actually co-founded. Um tell us about that. Yeah sure. So so I'm an engineer by training. Um I thought I'd go and and build robots and that turned out to be a little bit a little bit of a slow industry. So got out of that ended up uh getting into startups or NYC startup uh in highspeed data transport you know way back in 2011 feels feels like forever ago now. Um, and that company was bought by Facebook, which is how I ended up there. Uh, and at Facebook, you know, built all kinds of tools and infrastructure for the

organization. It was as it was growing. Um, and ultimately took over and ran the workplace team. Uh, founded that with Lars Rasm over there. Um, ran that out of London and sort of grew that up to be one of one of Stripe's major enterprise pillars. Um, came back here to New York. Uh, and that's around when I started to get into blockchain in 2016 where I founded an NFT company um called Additional Way back before NFTs anyone cared about them. I remember going up and down Sand Hill Road and being told by every investor that NFTs would never be interesting and never a thing and never exciting. Um, but we were like an iPhone app, so we were we were like the Instagram for uh NFTs. And it was really fun. It was really early stage, lots of

digital artists and digital creation um and distribution. Um, and I was just like super excited about the kind of decentralized and open network nature of blockchain. Ethereum was just happening at the time and was kind of having its its first kind of ground swell of developer excitement and applications being built and then uh pivoted out of that into an incident response company for a little while taking some of the learnings from Fang uh and frankly blockchain. If you really want to have like a great history of incidents, you work in crypto for a while. Um, and then you know after that pivot I really wanted to get back into the crypto space. I really love the people. I love the technology. You know, we we have this kind of saying in in crypto, I'm sure, you know, you know, it's like good morning, everything's early, right? And

that's just the best space to be in for technology. And so when I did the math, you know, and sort of worked out, well, what company do I think is going to have the the greatest impact, you know, on the world, you know, to take this technology that was emerging, um, that just naturally brought me to Stripe where I found that there was a kind of young and rapidly growing crypto organization. Um, and I joined about two years ago and and and took over that team and been running it ever since. Yeah, that takes us all the way through to Stripe. I think kind of how big and pervasive Stripe is in the payments ecosystem um is um a well-kept secret because kind of like a lot of this is abstracted away from normal users,

right? So, kind of for listeners who only see Stripe um kind of uh kind of in conjunction with kind of like credit card buttons um how how would you describe Stripe's missions mission and kind of your core offerings? Yeah. So, so look, first of all, I think a lot of that's by design. Um right, if you if you think about Stripe kind of from a from a user standpoint, we take this very complicated world of, you know, centralized finance, right? Let's not talk about blockchain yet, but like all of these kind of siloed parts of the traditional finance world and we simplify them right down to APIs and interfaces um and and UX that you know merchants can go and integrate in a couple of lines of code without having

to think about all the like complicated money movement that's happening under the hood. Um interesting personal piece of history, I have one of the first hundred Stripe accounts. Um, I was in Y Combinator a couple of uh of classes after uh John and Patrick. And I remember getting an email from John. I think back then it was called Dev Payments. They like they hadn't named themselves Stripe yet. And the pitch was, you know, so simple. It was just, listen, we've had tons of trouble just doing payment processing for our company. You know, we we've decided to make it a lot easier. You know, here's here's an API. Click here to sign up. Um, and you know, I think what was actually happening, you know, in the back end is they were opening merchant accounts kind of manually. they were sending a lot of mail back and forth,

you know, but but but I remember as a founder at the time, I hadn't even thought about how I was going to make payments work. I just assumed it was easy because when you work in technology, you get really comfortable with the idea that everything's internet native, right? Of course there's an API. Of course there's a GitHub page. Of course there's some like simple thing that I can build. But the reality was there wasn't for payments. You you had to go work with a bank. You had to open these complicated merchant accounts. So I actually think that very early sort of simplicity of the way that Stripe was presented as this is the fast lane right into all of these things that you just need to do to run your business. um actually still are present today and today it's just that fast lane is now

access to a lot more than payments right we call just financial infrastructure so everything from you know card issuing to you know now after after sessions you know money management and storage uh you know to to loans um and in fact you can even create companies on Stripe right you can go to Atlas so if you're if you're at the very beginning of like a startup accelerator you're probably at Stripe well before you even start to take payments Um, and now it's not just an API, right? We have like the integrated checkout suite that's all the UX and we have uh uh with the lemon squeezy acquisition, right? We have like progress towards like merchant of record. There's all these like amazing capabilities. I'm only probably touching like 1% of what the company does, but really that's what it should be, right?

As as an engineer, especially in in the valley, you know, that's every it's just an assumption. Of course, you're going to come and use Stripe. This is the the best and easiest and most well doumented, you know, and self-service product for accessing all of these complicated financial systems that you really do need to be able to leverage to grow a business, you know, from couple of dollars of test revenue up to billions. I'm sure we'll get into this in just a little bit, but Stripe is very much a bundler, right? kind of like it um it abstracts a lot of the complexity um that is uh that's kind of integral to kind of the payments stack and kind of

like all these various things kind of like you can do um kind of with money on the internet be behind kind of your smartly kind of collated APIs why is it so complex can you kind of give us some insight ides into that and I think kind of like we we we'll dive into that when we talk about kind of like the crypto aspect of this later but often kind of you think in principle this should be easy right kind of like sending money to a merchant should should not require kind of um the the world's most expensive fintech to kind of do this for you. Right. Right. Right.

Um yeah, so the history of money right is really really just what leads us here. It's a long and complicated history very like closely mapped to like the the the the creation of society. And so just like we have all of these you can almost map money down to culture, right? How many thousands of cultures do we have in the world? And each culture sort of grew out of a siloed set of humans and coming up with ways that they wanted to transact with each other. um is maybe like the very simplest way to kind of think about like the evolution of early commerce. Um and all of these rules got built inside of each of these cultures and each of these silos to define what it means to transact not just money but assets in general, right?

What does it m mean to move value from like one human to another, one human to a corporation, right? One corporation to another corporation, you know, into real world world assets or sort of these complex financial instruments that eventually grew. And you almost have to replay, you know, these hundreds of years of history to catch up to why it's so complicated today, right? In the US, why do we have been sponsors, you know, for for processing credit card transactions, but in other countries, maybe we don't. It's just sort of a trick of where of the history of of how credit cards evolved in this country versus how they evolved in the rest of the world. Um, you know, why why do we have certain types of regulated, you know, uh, banking systems? And every country has a different answer, right?

Like why was it developed in Germany, you know, for a specific set of rules? I'm sure entirely different than why the state of New York manages its money and sort of rules for its banking organizations. And I think like when you kind of carry that all forward, you just get a lot of complexity and then you get a lot of players who are trying to work to do interconnection at different points in history. So what it meant to go and interconnect banks 20 years ago through like these correspondent banking networks, right, is pretty different from how we'd probably connect banks if we were doing it today. And we're really starting to, you know, sort of see that with with stable coins, especially in kind of crypto networks. But, you know, all of these problems have have always existed and there have always been people trying to solve those problems

for the world. And I think Stripe was really just the first internet oriented company to solve this problem, right? And it was it was very much a there were systems to go and get merchant accounts at banks and there certainly were middlemen back there to go back then to go and do it but none of them were just a form on the internet you know that you filled out and that then returned an API key you know back to you. So I think Stripe was Stripe was one of these things that's very obvious looking back you know but at the time sort of took a bit of a a zoomed out requirement I think to come up with um not not to put words in in John and Patrick's mouths.

I'm sure they've talked about the history of the company many times, but you know, funny story when when I was first on boarding here, um, you know, cryp crypto wasn't in the best spot a couple of years ago, you know, we'd had a couple of major collapses. There were there were, you know, some sort of scary almost moments of of near DPEG even in in the stable coin world. And um, in my onboarding class, there was a moment where where John kind of came on and would just sort of take Q&A from everywhere. And I I just sort of was quietly keeping my mouth shut in the in the back on the Zoom, but someone else someone someone completely unassociated with crypto asked him, you know, about crypto um you know, and sort of how he thinks about it. And he and he said, I

think what's kind of getting to your point, which was, you know, Stripe historically has thought about here are all of these really complicated, difficult financial systems that have built for all sorts of probably justifiable reasons, you know, and here's kind of a a simple API to go and interact with them, you know, and then kind of here comes crypto and and now sort of stable coins specifically and just said, well, let's forget about all of that, right? What if we just rebuilt it from first principles to be digital money? And I think that that's that's really kind of a good capture is Stripe has been this for the traditional finance world, which is what really makes us so well positioned to also be this for this new world that's coming today.

Stripe kind of um saw the potential for um digital currencies super early on. So you guys started accepting um Bitcoin uh over 10 years ago in 2014. Um c can you talk about um what motivated that decision and also kind of I I know it was before your time at Stripe. Um but kind of you also kind of stripe also wound down its Bitcoin support just a couple of years later um kind of like uh and and only started engaging with uh the crypto ecosystem again um years later. So maybe maybe um talk us through kind of like this very exp early exploration of um of crypto ads for

payments. Yeah, I think I think like most technologies, you know, there there there are a couple of I won't call Bitcoin a false start because Bitcoin's, you know, doing wonderfully. Um, but at least in terms of exploring it from a from a payments rail standpoint, you know, I think I think we we when Stripe originally got into the space, there's a lot of excitement about this this technology really just catching on um becoming more more accessible. You know, we were far enough along that most people had heard about Bitcoin. There was certainly demand, you know, to use it as a payment method. Um, but the reality is, and I think last year at sessions, John Collison sort of addressed this very directly on stage when we were announcing that we were coming back with with stablecoin

payments. You know, the the the downside was, you know, almost twofold. Um, one, everyone really regrets every bitcoin they ever spent. I'm not I'm not sure about you, but but I I rented a hotel in uh in in France, you know, back in like 20 I think it was around 20 2014, 2015. Um, and I think I look back and I probably spent effectively, you know, $60,000 a night on that hotel. You know, probably not the best the best like feeling to have after after, you know, engaging in commerce or a transaction. Um, and second of all, look, the user experience just wasn't great. You know, we have high expectations because despite how poor and complex the the traditional finance world is, there's a lot of like virtualization that's

already happened. I was talking about how there's a lot of players in the space today, you know, to to make us consumers feel like that's not the case, right? So, so I can I can walk into a coffee shop and I can tap a card, right? And I get my coffee right away. You know, there's always been this joke the day you can finally buy coffee with cryptocurrency will be the day that that we've won. And 2014, you know, was not that date. You know, if you wanted to buy something, you know, online, you'd sort of make the checkout experience and we'd say, "Oh, we'll get back to you. you know, it's it it'll finish in a little bit, right? And we would wait for sort of the next set of blocks to be processed and the and the transaction to be secured and then we would send an

email and then you would come back and you it was just a very complicated process. And consumers, listen, if if my time at at at Meta really taught me anything, consumers do not have patience, you know, for anything less than instant. Um, you know, maybe a few seconds if there's high conviction. And I think ultimately just for those practical reasons, it was simply not a great payment method. and usage was not really there. And so Stripe, if anything, is a practical company despite being being, you know, very uh very head in the clouds when we're sort of dreaming here. And I think the the the decision was made reasonably quickly um you know, a couple years later to to cancel that as a payment method. Um and we waited, you know, very patiently until the technology caught up to the

point where we could do the demo that was done at sessions where it was just like, okay, don't blink. Here we go. Click done. And I think that that sort of piece of magic was missing. And uh and so so yeah, that's that's that's kind of been the history there. Um skips over some of the other work we've done where like just enabling the web 3 economies through things like on-ramps. And we still do offer a crypto on-ramp to uh to help sort of specifically crypto wallets uh onboard consumers um and participate in these these these new uh areas of commerce especially. You know, people are experimenting with Dows and NFTts had a really big moment for a while there. Um, so Stripe's been sort of in and around the space consistently uh since at least 2014, but I really think that this moment is sort of the

most native to Stripe's mission with uh with stable coins coming onto the scene. And I think that's why we're we're being a lot noisier about it now. I think it's a much more exciting time. If you kind of had to point your finger at one set of um events that kind of made you say, "Okay, the time is now." uh what what would that be? You know, I went to um I think the first the first year I was here about two years ago, I went to uh I think it was ETHC um and you know, in previous kind of crypto conferences that we'd been to, you know, really all of the focus was on sort of those topics I was mentioning before. You know, we really every

everyone was building a new NFT marketplace or everyone was building, you know, a new a new wallet, right? But I remember at ETCC there was this surprising undercurrent of stable coins starting to pop up. And I you know what I can't actually even peg why it was just something we started to notice. Um you know I think there was I believe there was like beginning talks of uh of sort of um like Mika back then and kind of like some reg regulatory conversations that were happening. Um and so that was sort of starting to spur this conversation about like regulatory impact on these tokens and how they might be used. Um I think we met with uh we met with a couple of folks sort of who were working towards that goal you know around like circle and we talked to uh I think vonarium back then um and a

couple of other organizations and everyone was aware of tether and kind of its its global impact but that was the first time that I actually heard the developer community talking about it. I really think kind of the slowdown in the NFT space gave everyone sort of a moment to breathe and think back towards okay what what technology shifts are happening what like opportunities are they're going to be for all of us developers over the next couple of years and when I came back and I wrote my notes up on on that conference it was it it was at the very top and I sort of just had like a general note that was like oh stable coins we should we should really keep an eye on those like maybe we should start to build more in that space so I you know it wasn't really

like an aha moment and like I making a transaction and the person next to me used a stable coin and I saw how amazing it was. It was actually much more developerled which I think is a lot of what happens in crypto and is sort of exciting is everyone just sort of quietly starts to talk about it and then everyone starts to build and then we get this kind of magical moment. Um, and certainly there'd been a lot happening before that, right? Like the origins of stable coins and crossber commerce that we were seeing out of existing companies. But that was that was kind of the first conference where I came away feeling like maybe it was starting to become something that developers would care a lot about. And that's generally the the beginning, right, of of starting to see interesting opportunities.

One of your previous startups um the the NFT uh project uh which was also built on Ethereum. So and you went to ECC. So kind of like was there always kind of this focus on the Ethereum space or kind of like what's your um uh what's your network strategy? So I know kind of like um the your current offerings in the crypto space um are on base, right? Um so h how how do you navigate this territory because kind of it can be pretty fraud, right? Yeah. So we're network agnostic. I mean, I I I I list ETHC just because it's one of the larger conferences and I think Ethereum developers were at the time especially like sort of on the forefront of like these programmable applications and

layers. Um but look, across our products, you know, we support Ethereum, um you know, Polygon, Salana, Base, Stellar, and we have a pretty wide ranging list of different networks that we interop with and uh I think Aptos pretty recently, you know, we we don't we don't really think about it in terms of like this network or that network needs to win. We are we are technologists who will take advantage of whatever is available to us at the time. Um you know we are very excited about what Bass is doing. Um you know we we use Bass in uh in the stablecoin financial account product that we just announced in at uh at sessions. Um but yeah I think the same thing with with the coin strategy to be quite honest.

It's a it's a common question that Stripe gets. You know what is what is your coin strategy? Which coins are you using? And you know, right now on the stable coin front, we're pretty focused on on USDC um kind of as a publicly tradable coin. You know, with the acquisition of Bridge, we now have USDB as kind of an internal infrastructure coin, which is pretty exciting. There's a lot lot to dig into there from a technology standpoint and kind of opportunity. Um you know, and then and then certainly we're aware of like the other large players in the space like Tether, um and kind of how those will start to play out as the regulatory environment changes. But no, I don't I don't I I'm a big fan of Ethereum, you know, and and I think at the time, especially when I was building my

startup, that was kind of if you're going to build an app, you'd go get what was it back then? Truffle, I think, was like the uh the sort of like like developer tool set you would download to sort of experiment from consensus. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And uh and so I think that was just like where these conversations were growing out of. Um, you know, we did start to hear about it also in the Salana conferences was another one I think that was starting to emerge then and is now becoming like particularly interesting from a developer standpoint. So what what are kind of the minimum requirements you kind of um have for network integration, right? Kind of like I mean you could look at security and performance and uh uh level of decentralization and so on.

What what are the things or do you do do you guys say look we we purely go by by user need um and kind of because in some way kind of like building on these rails you you can never be more resilient than the rails themselves. Right. Right. Um gosh how do we think about this? I think I think we take a pretty practical stance. Um you know we have we have we have a strong compliance posture at the company. I think Stripe, we've always thought of ourselves as the honest broker of this space and we need, you know, our largest users to be able to look to us confidently. So certainly there's a compliance layer here, which is we need to be able to do, you know, kind of the basic checks, right? The

sanctions checks and the and the transaction monitoring and all of these kind of like basic requirements for being able to kind of interop with uh with with legal businesses across the world, you know, but really past that, we're just watching for consumer and merchant demand. Um, you know, I I I think I think this is shifting a little bit, but we're not really the evangelists of the space, right? We are we are we are utility providers helping to connect, you know, merchants to this capability set. And so I think, you know, we probably have fewer, you know, chains and coins than, you know, your average decentralized exchange would expose. Um, but I think that that's okay. I think for now like we don't necessarily have to have a thousand

different chains available or a thousand different coins. What's important is that we give people this sort of high quality experience that they can rely on. Um and so you know that that that that maps down to kind of the the top I hate to use the word like blue chip but you know sort of the top you know coins and the top networks and frankly the most well-regulated ones as well. Um, listen, I'm sitting in New York right now and if you go pull up the NYDFS's green list, right, there's only a subsequ and and adapting throughout the world, but we're just we're pragmatists when it comes to that stuff. You know, I don't I don't I don't think that we have too too much of a dog in the fight specifically.

And certainly if you know our largest merchants come to us asking about a specific coin or a specific network you know just like we would for any traditional product we would go and and explore that and integrate it. We skipped over this part a little bit earlier. Tell us about um the services you kind of offer kind of on web 3 rails. You you mentioned uh stablecoin financial product and so on but maybe let's let's go go through them one by one. Yeah I can put my marketing hat on for a minute. Um, so, so we have all kinds of really cool services right now, specifically in the stable coin space.

Um, you know, the the the the banner services are kind of native to the Stripe products that we already you would already expect them to be attached to. So, for example, um, we have a payins product which if you have Stripe's uh, OCS checkout suite uh, integrated, you can offer your consumers the ability to pay with stable coins across a series of different networks um, and coins. And you can do that just like any other LPM. You can go into your payment method settings. You can click a button. Bing bang boom. Now you can pay with with stable coins. So pretty large product there. Uh you know powering uh most recently uh big announcement with Shopify. Uh rolling out to millions of Shopify merchants powering from uh behind the scenes with shop pay. Uh we

also have a payouts product which is sort of the opposite of this. You think about payins as a way to get global consumers to be able to pay your business in say the US. Payouts is the other way around. Whole world wants access to the to dollars, especially if you're running a digital marketplace or maybe a global global gig economy. You can use the payouts product with stable coins to distribute uh dollar peg stable coins to users anywhere around the world. Um we also have a global treasury product that is really offered more through our our acquisition with bridge which is all about managing uh your global treasury and money. Uh SpaceX is sort of the example that comes up all the time here. this sort of like global operation that needs to move all of their money back into dollars efficiently and easily every day. Um

that's more of like a low-level API integrated service. Um and then we've also uh have have some really interesting products that we're building around money management and storage. Most recently the stablecoin financial accounts which is if you think about okay now you have payins and you have payouts but where do you store that money? So, Stripe uh released a general money management suite uh at sessions and as part of that we're also offering stable coin storage and what's really exciting about that is it's not just storage in kind of our existing 50 or so markets it's 101 net new markets in which you can now store dollars with stripe and these accounts have access to US and EU rails as well so if you need

to pull money in you can do it over wire a sepa um and then I think maybe maybe the One other big announcement recently was uh stablecoin backed card issuing um which similar to stablecoin financial accounts is sort of available globally and allows you to issue debit cards that are backed by stable coins. So all of these all of these pieces kind of come together pretty magically. But really what you should be able to do is approach Stripe and think about all of the services we offer today through a lens of what if I wanted global access and dollar access specifically through stable coins and you should be able to find that.

I think you already kind of skirted over this, but when you look at the tools that kind of you offer on crypto rails and you kind of you compare them to the tools you offer on um on traditional finance rails, how would you compare the two? Oh, I don't like to think of them as different. right? You know, there's sort of it it we at the limit, stable coins should really be thought of as just another currency, right? And then and then under the hood, like at least for from the standpoint of like a user interacting with our products and then under the hood, everything should be faster and more integrated and and and

and hopefully, you know, less expensive thanks to the infrastructure. But, you know, when when my example on payins, I think, is sort of my favorite one for this, right? you you shouldn't have to go to a different company, a different website, a different experience just to be able to offer payins as a type of payment, right? We think about this as like a global LPM. And just like if you were a merchant and you wanted to accept um you know switch uh in in Sweden, I believe uh you would just go to a payment method page and click a button and the switch would flip and it would show up on the checkout screen for the appropriate folks. The same thing is true for stable coin acceptance, which is you are already processing probably cards or otherwise and you just want to expand your consumer reach. You can go

to the settings page, you can click the button, turn it on. That's kind of like I think the the the the bar, right? It should just be part of the experience. And I really think this is this is kind of the opportunity Stripe has maybe versus what what what's been offered historically from other organizations is you shouldn't have to go integrate another product or another service. you should be able to just do it within the experience you already have today. Um, you know, our users are running businesses that have uh usually centered not around payments, right? Norally centered around some other interesting consumer or B2B uh opportunity and creation. Um, and so I guess I guess that's like that's the bar, you know, for for some of these products that are that are certainly more complex where we're powering say a fintech, you know,

in those worlds we are kind of back to the API integration layer. Um, and I think in those worlds that's what's most effective. You know, Bridge, Bridge is a great example of this. If you want to really deeply integrate, you know, virtual accounts and you want to deeply integrate like money movement and you have even maybe some custom requirements that you want to work with the bridge team in terms of integrating. Um, you also have that option now which is to come to Stripe and say, you know, I want to go very close to the metal, right? And I want to enable sort of very unique and and and powerful money movement systems to build my fintech app or or otherwise. And I think I think we're going to see that split exist for a while in the stable coin space. It should be something that's kind of easy

and instant for the vast majority of the world who's just trying to kind of turn these things on and make and enable on top of services they already have. And then you're going to have these kind of close to the metal, you know, uh, super APIs that will allow you to go and create the fintex of the future. Um, and I think that's that's probably the right split, right? You sort of want a little bit of a choose your own adventure here. um if you're selling, you know, a shipped product uh through a tip tik tok marketing campaign, right? Or um you know, if you're building a uh you know, a Robin Hood or something like that.

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe a Revolute. Yeah, that that makes that makes a lot of sense for the merchants themselves. So there's I I would argue that there's a very small set of um customers who who were unavailable to them previously, right? kind of like there's very few people who who say I will pay in stables and stables only. Um so does the experience kind of become better for the merchant if you pay them in stables because in principle kind of like you could make this faster and cheaper. So kind of like one of the one of the main pain points for merchants and kind of like accepting card payments is often

that kind of like they actually settle weeks later, right? So kind of like uh and in principle kind of like on crypto rails you can make it almost instant. So kind of like what what's what's the upside for the merchant? Yeah. So I I I do actually think there's a pretty large port just just to challenge the very first statement. I do actually think there's a large and growing group of consumers who would prefer to pay with stable coins especially in geographic regions that were previously unreachable you know by the card networks. um especially as we see kind of the growth of of digital services. You know, one of one of our like large users of uh payins and payouts is sort of a digital trading organization. Um and that success all

over the world, you know, from Africa to Asia to to the US. And in that environment, you're actually doing like net new consumer reach. So, I do actually think there's a pretty strong angle there. But outside of that, um there's sort of two other categories, right? one is, you know, merchants are looking for uh to your point, you know, a faster ability to settle kind of inbound and they're also looking for um you know, especially US merchants are looking for sort of like local currency, right? Payment rails. So, how do I process everything in in dollars globally, right, without necessarily having to deal with say the FX coming from these regions that I'm otherwise transacting with? Um, but I think the settlement side is actually a good one to dig into just in general from a

business operations standpoint. You know the amount of time that you have to wait for an average credit card settlement can be you know days. The amount of time you have to wait for crossber payments. You know it can be days to weeks depending on the networks that are in between. You know with a stable coin payment you should be able to operate and you can operate you know near instantly. Um and you know maybe in the worst case couple of hours and I think like that capability has business operations benefits whereas sort of like the consumer reach just has sort of like business you know revenue reach benefits. Um, and I think just like any any good disruptive technology, right?

You can put a bunch of different lenses on this thing and say, "Okay, what are the specific reasons that this is going to work better for my organization?" And I think if you take like a digital marketplace, that reach might be the thing that's most interesting. Or if you take a small, you know, startup that's maybe a little bit cashstrapped, right, the settlement time might become more important. um you know and then if you take uh take other types of organizations kind of in the middle there's actually a simplicity layer which is like can I just turn on this like one new capability and still run my business in dollars without having to think about all the different LPMs. So I think there's like three or four different lenses you can put on it and they all sort of just add up to the proc

product being better. Um, I think again like I I come back to this point a lot. A lot of this is just sort of happening. Like the number of businesses and consumers transacting in stable coins is growing anyway and providing that capability is something that just like if there was another credit card network that was growing really quickly, we'd have merchants knocking down our doors saying, you know, why don't you support this new network? It's very similar. Um, you know, what is what is the volume? It's like seven 7.3 trillion, I think, is like the yearly adjusted transaction volume. And if you actually take the like unadjusted volume, I think I have it I have it written down here. It's like $34 trillion, which exceeds like the combined value of the two credit card networks in terms of transacted volume. So this this this trend is

occurring anyway. And like merchants will always want to reach into, you know, whatever financial capabilities their consumers or their buyers are adopting. Um, and I think sometimes it's almost hard for us to even know the exact reasons, right? Like there's there's certainly the crypto natives, right, that have kind of ended up in stable coins after years of trading other types of volatile assets, but there's also just this like rapid global growth of dollar access demand um that we're seeing especially across like Latin America where this is the currency that they hold that's most transactable.

And then you get this benefit on the other side of like settlement and and and business operations and money movement and treasury management. We've talked about dollars a lot now and um kind of like when it comes down I mean it is the globally um dominant currency. Um but kind of there's 400 million Americans and there's uh um 8 billion non US residents. Um what are your thoughts on on non US dollar stables? H so today the stable coin market I think it's like 99.9 I don't know if there's a second n fourth nine there um you know in dollars um and you know I I think

I think being a practical actor that that means great so so we can almost look at the stable coin market today and say okay it's dollars and then it's various sort of versions of dollars right it's like if you if you look across say you know a circle versus like a tether you know versus some of the other uh uh stable coins that are coming onto the market, you know, what actually backs it and pegs it to the dollar is a little bit of variance. Um you know, are you getting yield back when you're holding them or otherwise? Um in terms of like the the the growth of nond dollar stable coins, I think it's pretty exciting. Like I I think I think it would be embraced in general if you think about you know the complexities.

We haven't talked at all by the way about like on and off ramping into these things which is its own like huge challenges, right? But like like really if you look at that there's there's two lenses to look at it right one is to say okay how do we on-ramp from the local currency into the dollar right which is really we're just right back to the FX problem right there's some some like centralized actor there somewhere like defining the FX you know as you come in maybe it's a crypto exchange so it's more efficient um you know but in the future I do expect that there will be significantly more local stable coins that are issued locally and have kind of that connectivity back into traditional finance world through like the the bank that's backing the issuing and then the actual FX can happen onchain, right? So

you like on-ramp into say the the digital euro and then you transact from the digital euro into the dollar in an onchain FX environment that's potentially more hopefully at the limit significantly more you know efficient than you'd otherwise have. I think taken to the limit that gets pretty exciting, right? If we actually have all of these different coins, you know, mimicking their local currencies globally, then you get a really interesting effect of sort of broadscale global decentralized FX, which again should be significantly more efficient um for getting into those local currencies, which people still rely on. You know, it's it's it's a bit naive to say, okay, great. You know, your your your organization, you know, in Brazil like only needs dollars. You know, you maybe we're primarily transacting. perhaps they want to store

there, but the reality is at the end of the day they need to get back into local currency, probably to pay their local employees, to pay their rent if nothing else. Um, and so I think that that like space is getting pretty exciting. And I'm personally really excited about the idea of a pretty large scale decentralized FX market. Um, just because I think it'll it'll it'll do what stable coins have otherwise done, which will be increase access directly to the market as opposed to having to go through, you know, layers and layers of middlemen. Um, I used to tell the story of of of at Stripe, all the meeting rooms have like the meetings that are happening, you know, printed on the on the digital screen outside of them. And and where the crypto team used to be based in our old office, there was one

room next to us and every morning it had this really scary meeting title that was like um it was like daily FX global risk standup like like very scary title. It happened every morning at like 9:00 a.m. Um, and I used to just try and you know sit close to that room just to hear what was happening. But I think, you know, these these markets aren't always running 24 hours a day. They have difficulty in liquidity. Stripe is having to make these decisions about where are we holding our money to make sure that we can settle to the local merchants at some rate that's that's faster than it would take to go through the banking networks to get there. In a world of a of of local stable coins, those problems really fade away and uh treasury management, you know, selfishly for us, but preferably for all

businesses, just becomes easier, right? It's uh it's the same thing that has happened across this is a strange analogy but you know every other part of of of internet commerce you know hotel tonight right we don't we don't book our hotels days in advance I would expect the same thing to happen in in finance we shouldn't have to think about how much money we need in a specific currency days in advance we should be able to say great there's a local stable coin there we can transact in a decentralized nature instantly to get there and then if we really need to offramp into the local currency there's a local financial institution that's backing that currency that makes offramp simple. So, I think that that space will be a huge tailwind to the wider um stable coin ecosystem. Uh and I think I I I imagine where we are today where

it's all dollars is kind of analogous to the early internet. Okay. For a while a lot of this was coming out of the US and almost all of it was English and now we have a very much more interesting and diverse internet and I think it's the same thing. walk us through the experience that kind of a merchant today has kind of when they accept staples, right? So, kind of say I I'm a Tik Tok influencer and I I sell something on kind of like a a custom website. Um, and I have a Stripe integration and accept stables. Um, so kind of you you accept US dollar stables on my behalf and then kind of like how

how do I actually then get them? Do I have the option to kind of just get the get the stables from you? Because in principle you could kind of just send them on to kind of like a wallet of my choosing, right? Or kind of like do I need to have them offramped into a uh a traditional bank account. So today when you stablecoin acceptance is available primarily to US merchants today um expanding very soon uh and all stables that are paid into a stripe checkout experience settle to to fiat. So our our merchants today are accustomed to storing in fiat and so they the easiest way to make this appear like any other LPM that they're local payment method

that they're accustomed to accepting is to settle into dollars. Um, now what's kind of cool is in the most recent uh integration with Shopify powering Shopay, those merchants for the first time actually have a choice. They can settle into uh into USDC directly um I believe on base um or they can choose to settle into fiat. Um and so that is the direction this is going. So today primarily settlement down to fiat just to map the kind of uh user experience that the merchants are accustomed to and to like lower the friction of number of things you have to learn when you're coming on board as a uh as a as a as a merchant who's accepting stable coins.

But as we think about this more globally that stops making sense, right? Like especially in countries where the merchants would primarily prefer to store in say dollars but can't today. They have to settle to their local currency. like the natural capability and you can you can squint a little bit and imagine our road map when you think about like stablecoin financial accounts that are rolling out. This is the capability that should be there, right? You should also be able to store down into um into stable coins. So today storage down to fiat Shopify merchants the choice of either future choice of either for anyone. Um what about expanding um these uh stable integrations for um other jurisdictions outside of the US? Because I I imagine um I mean I understand that kind of um

the pain points for um merchants in the US are particularly big because kind of the the um the fees on credit cards are often higher than in some other jurisdictions. So for instance, I think in Europe they are pretty um tightly regulated. Um but um I imagine that lots of merchants worldwide would love to accept some sort of stable. What what's the blocker for you guys? I mean in principle it seems like um you have this feature.

Why can't you roll it out? Right. Right. So to be clear um the most recent the Shopify integration which is available to those merchants that is actually globally available. So that's available in I believe uh I think it's like 40 or 50 countries. Um so so we're already doing it. This is sort of the like the nice way to answer it. The complicated answer to your question is you know it's just integration and rollout timing. So availability of these products you know per country per like local financial rail especially where we want to support direct settlement to those local currencies um is just just product build time. So it has has nothing to do with with us not wanting to have it there.

Um, and I think Shopify was the first real big step towards being able to support that with the payans integration. Um, but you should expect global availability of this product in the very near future. Um, versus it being something specific to Stripe that we would we would ever choose not to. In fact, in fact, actually the stablecoin financial accounts are a really great example of where this has almost happened in sort of an unusual way, right? It was actually the fastest method for us to go and release this product was to release it in all the countries Stripe's not in yet. It's actually a little bit easier to go and say, "Okay, let's let's go, you know, it took us 15 years to get from like one to 50 countries, but it took us 15 months to get from 50 to 151." So, I think like

like that's the kind of disruption that we just like everyone are sort of learning how to wield is exactly like what order of operations should we roll things out to which countries. Um but but yes, stablecoin payins we expect to be available to all Stripe supported countries plus these 101 countries that we've rolled uh stablecoin financial accounts out to um in the very near future. You already said that kind of on and off ramps are clearly a huge pain point for the ecosystem, right? kind of like and if you zoom way out and you kind of think about um kind of blockchain infrastructure as the next evolution in kind of how financial rails will work.

Um kind of building good on and offramping experiences is absolutely crucial, right? because kind of like quite frankly um legacy finance financial products is where all of the value is um and kind of yes we have super cool protocols and so on in in web 3 but kind of like a lot of the problem is how do you actually get the value across right um so so talk us through how you see that um problem set today and how you see it evolve yeah look look we are clearly in the dialup era of of like on and off ramps globally. Um, depending on the country that you're in,

um, let's just take let's even take the US as an example. You know, even even in the US, it's reasonably difficult for your average consumer who has never held any sort of stable coin um or crypto asset to get on chain the first time. um you know as we provide an on-ramp that I think lowers this barrier pretty significantly but even there you know you're you're sort of going through a KYC flow you know you're providing a credit card the networks aren't always huge fans of on-ramping into into crypto so maybe you're actually providing a debit card you know or you're connecting your bank you're sort of making this movement happen you're learning the the the network as you go it's it's one of the biggest gaps that's out there I actually think that a lot of folks globally won't really have to on-ramp in

that way in the future. I expect that they will start to gain access to stable coins more through some other type of payout, right? Uh just just just like the way that we we we get money today, I would expect employers to start offering payments in stable coins and that to be the method by which for example an average employee in LAM like receives access to their first stable coin. Um, you know, I when we look at like the payins and payouts marketplaces that are operating on Stripe, right? These are basically giant systems of distribution for stable coins globally. Um, I just don't I don't think the world we're in today is is really a sustainable one.

Um and I wonder often how of how long we'll be in the hybrid space. You know, I'd like to it's always easier to think to the future and say, "Oh, great. When when we're all just on uh on what we are today, which is, you know, basically there's Wi-Fi everywhere and we get to take the internet for granted. like when do we stop having to have a phone number that we have to call for dialup? Um unfortunately I don't think we're going to be there tomorrow. Um and I do think that uh it's going to be primarily powered you know in the extreme short term you know by uh some of these these really interesting organizations that are growing that are kind of consolidating the on on and off ramps especially in the most difficult countries. So um yellow card is a really interesting example here right that is

uh it's run by Chris Maurice and he is uh he is he's creating these on and off ramp with all of the local financial institutions all across Africa um which would otherwise be very difficult right it be very difficult for a company to go show up over there and make each one of these integrations and relationships such that they can start to on an offramp um that will then provide a lot of the liquidity access um in and out to the businesses that will then making the payouts or otherwise to consumers or other merchants. So, I think it's it's a little bit of a of a roundabout way of thinking about it, right? It's not it's not that like the average on-ramp is just going to get better. It's that you probably won't need an on-ramp in the future. It's probably more likely that you'll simply have stable coins as an

option in another way that you would be acquiring money. Um, at the limit, your bank is hopefully just providing it as an option, as a payout as well. Um, but probably in the short term, it's much more likely to be coming from say your your merchant account at Stripe. So, if you're taking payments in, we've been talking a lot about stablecoin payments that come in and settle as dollars. Well, the other way around, right, is just as interesting is you're taking payments in in local currencies, but you're settling them instead to stable coins. Um, those types of capabilities, I think, will actually drive consumer holding and adoption far faster than kind of these um, you know, these sort of like Windows apps that we have today for like on and off ramping, especially at the consumer layer. Um, and we're seeing this we're seeing this happen

really fast at at major financial institutions, right? I think like the Bidd Fund is like a good example of like a nonstable coin, but like rapidly growing like onchain asset that will just be much more native in terms of how it will pay out or pay in from stable coins. I think things like that will just propagate these coins across the the the kind of commercial world and then that will then propagate to the consumer space. Hope that answers. It's a little bit of a roundabout way of saying kind of kind of what it is. I just I I think I think it'll be a different method by which people get access to these things versus an improvement on the existing system.

Yeah, I mean I mean you're completely right in that kind of like if there's more net inflows than outflows then kind of like the entire stable coin space kind of will become less reliant on future inflows. Um I I think there's still a very wide um spectrum of on-ramping experiences, right? kind of like if you kind of look at um the very I mean yeah kind of like you can you can on-ramp with a credit card typically that's very expensive kind of like often kind of like people go v via centralized exchanges so kind of they do KYC with a centralized exchange they kind of send fiat to the centralized exchanges uh bank account and then they kind of offramp into the uh decentralized space

on the other side clearly that's a terrible experience but kind of we've seen kind of the rise of these on-ramping tools. So for instance in Europe we have we have Monarium which kind of lets you um identify your wallet with an IBAN. You kind of send euros to that IBAN and within 20 seconds it's magic shows up in your wallet um kind of like obviously and at zero fees right because kind of like it's priced into their business model because kind of like they get custody of your euros. So kind of obviously there's some sort of yield play here. Um or kind of I mean we see the same thing um uh in principle with kind of like Pix integrations in Brazil um or kind of like even in the in

in the US kind of like there are players like Noah now which kind of offer this kind of um this kind of service. What are your thoughts on these? Yeah. So, so we have we have actually if you look at like bridge and virtual accounts and like stablecoin financial accounts very similar, right? Like access to these these integrations between the traditional and and crypto financial rails. Um so with like a stablecoin financial account, you get an IBAN as well. You get an an AC uh set what is it a routing number, right? And an account number that you can move a wire into.

Um, I think that it's a really important step towards like integrating, especially on the commercial side, how how how businesses move this money in and out. Um, and I think it's I think it's it's a core principle to the idea that I'm just trying to access what the stable coin represents, right? I think like we we kind of come back to this idea of like what is the conviction, you know, is the conviction to hold a stable coin or is the conviction to hold a dollar, right? Right? And if the conviction is to hold a dollar, then you're going to expect dollar like rails or if the conviction is to store euro the the expectations of euro rails and then what's actually backing the thing that you're holding, right? Is is almost irrelevant, right? So this is this is I

think what what these kinds of on and off ramps are encouraging is this idea that you can make the stable coin act from a rails standpoint just like the fiat currency that you're otherwise accustomed to. And over time, we expect this to become more invisible, right? You won't you won't really be talking about how, oh, I can use AC to on-ramp into stable coin. You'll just be saying, I can use a to get into dollars, but then the organization that's doing that is maybe using a bridge virtual account on the back end. And what they're actually doing, right, is they're storing USDB, you know, or or or or or maybe a custom stable coin that they've minted, right? Um, but to the user, it can just feel like dollars. And so I

think that that's that's that's maybe like the next evolution in the on-ramp from sort of the classic consumer let's go use a credit card in this very explicit I am onramping experience over to I'm accessing a currency type I wish I had um and I'm utilizing the rails that I'm otherwise accustomed to. I think if you take it one step further we'd hope that those rails kind of disappear. I don't I don't I don't in Europe you all have much better like systems for sort of eyebands and and rapid movement but like the the AC network is not is not like positively thought of in the US is like a wonderful way to move money around. Um you know we think much more in apps here you know we think about you know what's do you have do you have Venmo you know do you have

PayPal like for especially for a consumer to consumer experience. So, I think a lot more of those products will be powered by stable coin backing and they'll have the access to that rail for on-ramping and off-ramping, but it'll all happen very much behind the scenes. Mhm. You made two very big strategic acquisitions this year. Um, namely Bridge and Privy. um talk us through kind of like what both of them do and how they complement um what Stripes Stripe already had before.

Right. So very excited by the way about about both of these. Um I can't comment very deeply on on on the privy front. That's that's sort of an in progress uh acquisition. But on on Bridge um listen first of all we the Bridge team is just incredible. like fantastic group of executors who have been working in the stable coin space exclusively. You think about kind of first mover and second mover advantages like bridge came in and started to build with a very clean philosophy towards we are going to go and engage and make stable coins as magical as stripe was able to do for sort of the traditional finance world.

Um I'm not 100% sure. I think at one point even on their website I think they they they were described themselves as the stripe of stable coins. Um, but listen, they they what what what what Bridge really does is they've really optimized this API experience to access all of the underlying power of stable coins. And they've done this with these virtual accounts which power things like what you were describing in terms of being able to move in and out of traditional finance rails into stable coins for organizations. Um, they've really created wonderful uh uh orchestration systems for being able to command movement of these stable coins.

um they've optimized a pretty pretty exciting incentive on and off ramps that that you and I were talking about a little bit, but they've made them all abstracted away. So, if you're trying to get out into a local network, maybe you're using like, you know, one of these crypto exchanges or partners in the back end, but you don't have to know that. You're just running a command to pull the money out into a local account. Um, and I think they're just iterating really successfully in that space. Um, and executing with some of the most interesting organizations in the world. Um, I love the SpaceX example. I think it's just like it's one of these unique cap like examples of treasury management that it would just would look like a a phone book of you know processes and money movement and decision-m to do in the traditional finance world but with

bridge it's just an API call um and so I think bridge has really just been on that forefront and for stripe being able to leverage an internal infrastructure partner uh is is is is just step function impact for the organization. Um I think you know if if you look historically we we mostly used external partners for stablecoin uh access liquidity management orchestration. Um and so it was very natural I think to find you know who who we believe is the best in the industry to bring in to our organization and certainly for my team who's operating you know primarily on the product build side you know it just was a was like hitting hitting the easy

button across the ability to go and and and and make these products happen now with a in-house partner and so I I I think I think most natural and obvious acquisition out there for us um and obviously very exciting I think for the for the crypto world to see Stripe leaning in that deeply. Um, but also just the validation I think of of of that space in general. Um, Privy, again, I can't I can't go super deep into Privy. I think Privy's doing some really amazing things with just general decentralized wallet access and non-custodial wallets. Um, and there's there's there's a lot of interesting opportunity there, but I I'll leave it at that. I think there's there's a lot of future news to come out on that front. Yeah, I I have rather philosophical question to kind of end

on. kind of when the web 3 movement kind of started um it was very much in the vein that kind of like these will be kind of better. It will be peer-to-peer kind of money. It will make kind of big financial players redundant kind of like people will kind of be able to kind of do things um on their own by themselves. Um and uh now kind of to some degree to a large degree it's kind of moved into um kind of just giving um more efficient and resilient tools to the man right so kind

of like large financial in institutions kind of now used these rails to kind of um kind of reap efficiency gains. um h how how how do you see that kind of in um in the larger picture kind of like coming somewhat from the other side? Yeah, I don't think I'm coming from the other side first of all, but I think I think like I I I've I've gone back and reread the Bitcoin white paper a couple of times. Um I think it's easy to put different lenses on on that statement, right? But what we're really trying to build is some sort of a peer-to-peer system of cash transfer, right? That's open and

accessible to anyone and does not require an authority in the middle for it to exist, right? And and just a very simple kind of set of of capabilities. And I think any system that's developed that permits you to have infinite, you know, optionality, right, will certainly spawn versions of itself that do have, you know, centralized actors and those will be adopted, I think, where they're most beneficial to the to the users. And so, like my my example a minute ago, I think is a good one. I think while kind of the barter system of like I have cash in my back pocket and I've walked into the town square has great optionality of the types of things I could maybe trade

for and the types of engagements you know that maybe I wouldn't traditionally have access to like I also just want to go to Amazon and like buy you know paper clips or or or or you know a light bulb or something that I need and in those experiences and in those transactions um I think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of like just expectation from consumers today about the types of protections and and and sort of management of the payment and and and they don't really need to know what's happening under the hood and they don't really need to hold the dollar in their hand. So I I just I don't I've never felt like these two things are particularly deeply at odds with each other. I think that like one is simply an an iteration or a branch of the

other. Um, and I guess you could argue that in the traditional space, maybe we've started to lose the first a little bit because the history of money is also pretty decently decentralized and open, right? As we all we all sort of have dollars in our back pocket and we're we're going and purchasing things from, you know, our neighbors or other other people who are who are selling something and we're making a value transaction. And there's really wasn't too much of a middleman in there except backing, right, the value of the dollar itself. Um, and I think the reason a lot of that has sort of has has shifted has been to do with like scale and and and and like like trust um, and kind of expectations of of of additional services that are built on top of it that maybe aren't

available. But I I think I think we'll just blockchain and and and and stable coins, they they'll push us steps towards the advantages of like peer-to-peer networks, hopefully without also absorbing like the downsides. And this is this is what I was getting at a minute ago, which is like a lot of these kind of consumer trust asurances can likely be built on chain. Um I was I was at a conference pretty recently I think I think Salana Accelerate and someone was asking me you know what what what you know what other startups ought to exist you know what should people be building and very much you know the statement here is with with like a disruptive technology like like crypto like all of this stuff gets to be

rebuilt like who gets to define what it is to do and capture who gets to define what it is to do a refund you know who gets to define what it is to make a real estate transaction like there are just endless iterations of commercial actions that you might, you know, describe today as primarily centralized, right? Like buying a house is a great example. I'm not sure what it's like in Germany, but in in the US, buying a house, right, is this very like centralized manage process. Um, and I think having the capability to do it entirely in a non-entralized way actually probably lands us where most people get somewhere closer to the

center where we lose a lot of the downsides of like an extremely centralized system, but we don't maybe absorb 100% of the risk of an entirely decentralized system. So, I think both sides of the barbell are necessary to kind of get to the future world that we want. Um, and I guess I guess that's sort of my answer to that. I think there's a I don't I don't think Stripe or most actors are really philosophically opposed to either side. I think what we're looking for is, you know, what are the best capabilities of this technology and how do we expose it to the people who are trying to run their businesses and and and make their purchases every day. Famous last words.

Thank you so much, John, for coming on. It's been a pleasure. For sure. Thanks for having me.