OKX & ICE Launch 24/7 Tokenized Stocks

[0:01] [music] We treat crypto rails or tokenization just as a technical choice. And in the same sense that when you go to I don't know JP Morgan or Bank of America you don't ask you know what [music] what kind of database they use. We have the same approach. If you look at our website we don't talk much you know about the rails about tokenization but it's very much um an enabler of ours to build like better product better access better [music] UX. >> Every financial product is a decision a record a way to reach you and distribution is king. We're in the age where distribution is moving from branch
[0:31] to phone to agent. Being able to to reach people um on device is is really really powerful. >> It's helping people understand, you know, what is this product? How do you get comfortable with compliance? What are the differences between these funds? How do you separate them all? And I think that's going to be um the big area now. A lot of companies are stable curious and token [music] curious, but uh can you guide them by the hand and and answer all of those gnarly risk questions? The remittance use case is such a powerful one to [music] start with within the the Samsung user base.
[1:03] So many people with, you know, Samsung phones can actually now connect very [music] easily to people all around the world and their family, their friends, and more. We're going to drastically increase the the spendability and the UTD out of those accounts. Welcome to tokenized, [music] the show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I am the founder at Brain Food and head of market dev over at Tempo. You will of course notice this week that there is no Kai Sheffield, but returning to the show is Naz, who's the CEO of Bastion. How
[1:34] you doing, Naz? Doing great. Very exciting uh to to to be on. Thank you so much for having me and excited to to dig into the Samsung news. >> Good to have you back. Lots of stories to cover and u making a debut is Greg Bria who is the head of product at Morse formerly known as Sling Money um and former global head of financial services at Cash App. So Greg quite a quite a background you've got. Hopefully you can give us some perspective. Nice to have you. >> Thanks for having me Simon. Excited to be here. >> Yeah, likewise. Likewise. And last but by no means least is another debuton. Uh
[2:06] it's Paulenol who is co-founder and CEO at Spyo. Good to have you on the show. So, congrats on the race this week. >> Thank you, Simon. I'm glad to be here. >> All right, just before we jump into the news, I've got to remind viewers that views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. And please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice. And I'm happy to remind you that this podcast is sponsored by our friends at Fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses from Visa to Walpay to Bridge
[2:38] to Revolute. With over a hundred billion dollars in monthly stable coin volume, Fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintexs, remitters, and banks to issue, move, hold, and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built-in compliance. With Fireblocks, you get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity, and access
[3:09] on and off ramps in over 60 currencies. Makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more at fireblocks.com. All right, story number one this week uh is that OKX and the New York Stock Exchange owner ICE have filed to launch OKX ICE, which does sound vaguely like a '90s rap group, but it's actually a 247 tokenized stock venue for 63 US companies. And OKX raised more money at
[3:41] a $25 billion valuation. So, this uh JV between OKX and ICE uh has Andrew Como as the co-chair, former mayor of New York. Um they're filing this launch under the new innovation exemption rules with the SEC. And so, um they're going to run on X layer through a permissioned unis swap V4 pool and each stock is paired against USDC, USDG, or USDT. To trade, you need not a non-transferable
[4:11] soulbound token, an NFT, I'm guessing. uh issued after OKX's US entity has run all of the usual identity and AML checks. So this is a pretty interesting model of tokenized stocks coming on chain. Now I'm going to start with you on this. I'm sure you've got a pretty good view of what the what the corporates are looking at. We've been following on this show, you know, sort of Robin Hood and the DTCC and many others. What are your thoughts on sort of this partnership with um ICE and OKX
[4:41] and and and the role of tokenized stocks? Yeah, something that we're uh seeing a lot both across B2B use cases and and consumerf facing use cases is actually the desire to include just more financial products and easier access to financial products to jump in and out of. Um on the corporate side, it's more for you know like balance sheet and and treasury management use cases and and cash reserves. But on the uh on the consumer side, there's a tremendous amount of interest on accessing, you know, stocks uh anywhere easily 247 uh
[5:12] and embedding those into different platforms. I think that it's going to be less about I need to go on Robin Hood to access it, but let's just embed tokenized stocks and way more embedded financial accounts that are available anywhere. And so I'm very excited about that because I think that we're going to see Coinbase, OKX, Backpack, others uh really push those embedded brokerage accounts in, you know, all the new neo banking services. >> Greg, I mean, you're looking at a pretty global audience. Have you have you looked at and considered this? What do
[5:42] you think the appetite is um in some of the global south populations for access to the US stock market? [snorts] >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean, I mean, we really see just interest exploding in the sector. Tokens are money, money is tokens in in here. Um, when you have 247 equities, I think you really need 247 settlement cash. Um, and stable coins like really provide that service there. I think it's interesting coming in what you look at consumer participation and how behavior really looks um when you come into tokenized uh assets as well,
[6:13] especially if you look at after hours trading where you have slippage, where you have price impact, do you have liquidity to support all of that? And really at the end of the day, do customers understand where they sit um when you're transacting. But if you have uh an individual that's not necessarily uh sitting in in market hours in New York City, uh that access is absolutely crucial and that's where you see consumers really looking to participate. >> Yeah, different time zones matter. Um and if you don't have a lot of overlap and it's very expensive and or it's just not available to you, um then that's that's kind of a big barrier. Paul, your
[6:44] thoughts on this story? Yeah, I mean what I found really interesting behind that um is the fact that we actually see that you know something very basic from the US perspective which is access to securities accounts is not uh a commodity you know in many places around the world and in our case at Spole we are not focused on equities we 100% focused on cash uh yield specifically uh but we sort of solved the same issue which is access to money market funds cash funds in general um so I very much um relate if you want to to what we are
[7:14] seeing here in space, >> you know, uh I think the the filing here had a a really nice little nuance in it, which is um tokenized prices might drift from the real shares outside of market hours. And I think the market hours thing and uh price discovery is going to be really key. I was speaking to a very senior professional, one of the largest custodians in the world who was saying that's something they're taking very seriously as the DTCC looks to bring more tokenized stocks um to market. as I mean I'm sure you've spoken to corporates who are thinking about ours
[7:45] operations and price drifting in treasury um could be could be a big deal. >> Definitely. Yeah. Um I I think that the and this is one of the reasons also why we're we're excited about um the you know the the the federal trust bank charters um kind of like and more companies moving into not just from the money movement and MTLS and MMBBS but actually having qualified custodianships to be able to offer more embedded uh like securities account to Polyron's um
[8:16] point it is not a commodity yet and so we're we're very excited about that we obtained in our own OC charter pretty recently uh conditional approval for the OCC charter and we're seeing more approvals in this space which is excellent and means that those securities are going to have more distribution basically um across the US but we'll have a a story about exactly that um just later today as well um but Paul I want to ask you the same question as well because uh you know you will I imagine have to deal with a lot of
[8:46] corporate treasurers who are probably quite new to anything tokenized and you know have have questions about the risk and have questions about the the fungeability and have questions about access and you know sort of treasurers care about two things like speed of cash and risk and how do you answer the risk side of the equation >> I think interestingly enough we got these questions much more from like crypto treasurers than non-crypto or traditional treasures uh to be to be honest um we treat you know crypto rails or tokenization how however you want to
[9:17] call it just as a technical choice at the end of the day and in the same sense that when you go to I don't know JP Morgan or Bank of America you don't know you don't ask you know what kind of database they use at the end of the day to maintain uh your your checking accounts your securities accounts etc um we have the same approach if you look at our website we don't talk much you know about the rails about tokenization but it's very much um an enabler of ours to build like better products better access better UX at the end of the day um so we don't get that question too much just
[9:48] one thing I will say is that we've seen Interestingly like rating agencies change also in terms of how they look at these sales. Um when we started the business when we launched the products like two years ago a year and a half ago the first discussions we had with rating the largest rating agencies that that we all know they all um looked at blockchain technology the underlying um chains as an additional risk to some extent that has completely changed. If you look at the uh ratings, the latest assessments that they have done in the space, it's not treated in the same way
[10:19] today. Um so I think you know things have changed quite a lot and relatively fast uh over the past few months on that aspect and I do think at the end of the day that it's um you know strictly better to have a chain plus maybe a backup register of that chain in case it stops working to operate in terms of just pure operational residency than just having a centralized um database like [clears throat] a server. Right. >> Indeed. It's going to be so interesting to see how this partnership between ICE and OKX develops as well. I think it's
[10:50] really interesting for an incumbent player to be going the partnership route, but they also invested more than 200 million uh into OKX at that 25 billion valuation back in March 2026. And um this recent extension added SC Ventures, you know, Standard Charted probably one of the more aggressive banks in terms of leaning into being an off-ramp, Circle, Ripple, Cube, and Cube Research, one of the big um kind of market makers and and hedge funds in the space. So really interesting gathering
[11:20] of folks. Uh Greg, before we leave this one, I've heard a a lot of noise about the the sort of the consumer protection and risk of consumer harm around tokenization and do consumers know what they're buying. I would question whether consumers ever know what they're buying, but uh how do you think the innovation exemption and the role of the SEC could help here? And and do you think that there's going to be demand from the global south user base from this? And and how would you think about education protection and that sort of thing when you're dealing with the user base? >> Yeah, it's a really good question, Simon. I mean really I think we see an
[11:51] adjustment period as as more and more consumers especially in a global audience become familiar um with these protocols look at experiences that are embedded more and more um and financial experiences in their wallets. I think a lot of it comes down to what in those purchase flows and buys and sells. Is it really clear for the customer um what what they have access to and and not only just the asset but what this looks like on voting shares, what it looks like on dividends, especially comparing a trady uh experience that some some might be interested in um into this
[12:23] crypto sphere. Um at the end of the day, oftentimes when you have a broad access, this is often like a first experience for for users. So, as you're coming through um each of those flows, um I think it'll be more and more important, but not uh stopping any of the appetite here. >> The appetite's there. It's that first uh first experience that matters. Well, um there's uh you alluded to some uh some charter news that you'd had. Um we've also uh learned this week that both Rain and Modern Treasury, shout out to those guys, sponsors, applied to the OC for
[12:54] National Trust Bank charters. Um, so Brain National Trust Bank would be based in New York, holding digital assets and dollars for institutions, managing reserves for stable coin issuers, and issuing and redeeming redeeming stable coins under Genius. And it would be the ex CFO of Square Financial Services that would be the president and CEO subject to OC review. Um, and Modern Treasury National Trust Bank would combine its payments and settlement uh with digital asset custody. It's not intending to
[13:24] lend. Naz, you've just been through this process, got a conditional OCC approval. You said you were excited about the the role of that trust chart. So explain to me why that might matter to somebody like a rain uh to modern treasury given given what they do. >> Yeah, there are just so first and foremost so happy for uh you know for more companies to come go in this direction. Also a very big fan of Farooq and and Charles and the team at Rain. I think that there are a few things that are important to note. The first one uh is that you want to have access to all
[13:55] 50 states, right? And problem today is that you rely on a patchwork of very different regulatory frameworks across a large amount of states, right? You need to go to every single regulator, state regulator today and obtain a money transmitter license and you know answer questions, audit request and a bunch of other things. and especially on the stable coin side which is more recent. Uh all of these kind of criteria are very different. Texas is very different from New York which is very different from California and others. Um so that
[14:27] kind of like allows you to operate in a way that is much more efficient I would say as a company rather than really having to spend too many resources. The second aspect that I'm going to say is that everyone is looking at Genius uh stable coin genius compliance stable coin issuance as one of the check boxes that you need to do. It's not necessarily that every single company is going to start with it, but ultimately everyone that gets big enough will think about issuing their own stable coin and you need to have that that ability to do so. It's kind of like a hedge to be able
[14:58] to to issue down the line at some point. Um so I'm going to say that this is the second part and the third part is actually what we were discussing before which is with money transmitter licenses you can't touch any other type of asset right but if you look at the financial experiences that are being built both for corporates and and consumers it's actually going way beyond the money the money is the great ubiquitous you know uh uh instrument that is common to all of these experiences but ultimately people are going to want to trade stocks they're going to want to trade commodities they're going to want to trade computes they're going to want to
[15:29] do a lot of things that you know uh you're only going to be able to to custody with a with a qualified custody license like a a trust charter and that does give you so much more flexibility. It helps your unit economics in the process. I I find RAIN such an interesting business in that you know sort of they use the Puerto Rico license to be a Visa direct principal member but it allows them to issue cards globally. Um they're issuing credit cards which has higher interchange. So, a Rain customer doing a stable coin linked card
[16:00] potentially has really good economics on a what looks like a card program that just happens to use stable coins. They've acquired both up top and answer two businesses that were really focused on sort of almost closed loop loyalty programs for brands. You know, one more around sports clubs, one more around uh kind of local uh shops. What Ansa can do is they can make uh kind of the ability uh to use Apple Pay with a virtual card, work with any point of sale terminal,
[16:32] travel down the network, but also carry your loyalty information and up top was doing some clever things with NFTTS and loyalty. Imagine if a sports stadium could issue its own stable coins to your stable coin backed card. you would get certain points for everyday spending, but anything you do in stadium would be, you know, 10% off, 20% off or or something like that. And it would they don't even have to change their existing point of sale system. So, really interesting acquisitions there by Rain. And of course, now they can be the
[17:02] issuer of that stable coin and that's something that you've seen a lot of companies look to move into is that ability to to to kind of issue. Uh interested uh Paul in in your views on this story and the increasing role of licenses. So I know it's a little bit different looking at it from sort of Europe but you do have global ambitions I understand. So interested in your views. >> Yeah correct. I mean important to stress as you said that for now we operate in Europe. So less familiar with the the US landscape although we are looking at it um um quite um extensively now but um
[17:34] overall what I'm really excited about is what um you can do now with stable coins. Uh and with stablecoin recognized as a mean of payment you know as a form of money both in Europe and the US. This opens up for super interesting uh use cases. I'll give you one example that is directly relevant in our business. We have very recently together with Coinbase which we use um at the fund level as part of the fund stack um unlocked um stable coin payments for the subscription and the redemption of our money market or cash fun shares. And that for us is really interesting
[18:04] especially in USD because we have a lot of clients that come with us um operate in the you know not necessarily in the US but that have USD and that want to use uh for moving money in and out of the funds and doing it via international wires is really a pain. uh it's long to settle, it's costly for many of them, specifically for SMBs, retail, and the ability for them to use USDC to send directly money to the fund and to redeem also in USDC uh is super exciting. And we've seen the volumes in terms of the just the volumes of payments in and out
[18:34] of the funds um really skyrocket since we launched it a few weeks ago. Um this is just to give you one example. Of course, there are many different things, but the use of stablecoin in the payments industry uh and international markets for buying and selling uh securities is is super interesting. >> Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to watch that volume grow. I know you guys have grown pretty rapidly and we'll we'll come to your race kind of a little bit later, but uh Greg, I I'm interested. I don't know if you saw the complaint from the Independent Community
[19:04] Bankers Association of America. They sued the OC and controller Jonathan Gold to overturn a March 2026 chartering rule and interpretive letter 1176 from 2021 and it accounts the 21 trust banks approved by the OC and sort of says consumers don't know necessarily what the backings are and that there's no FDIC insurance on these sorts of things and it wasn't the intention of the trust to kind of do that. So really interested in how you think about again the the
[19:35] consumer here and and their preference for stable coins relative to the the potential harms that we we haven't seen battle tested um many times in history anyway. >> Yeah, we're still on the the early side of the adoption of these curves. Um when we look at the number of charters that coming through that's not the scarce part. I think as we look on uh the issuance here really uh it's worth tracking before like commitment um as it comes through and there'll continue to be a maturation of the the process for consumers. I think on the back end
[20:06] really at the end of the day what customers uh are looking for is that consolidation of ledger custody movement money movement under one supervised roof. Um and this is really where like that is all moving towards um as we go forward. I mean, Naz, it does feel to me like there are narrow banks here today. Um, and uh, it happens to use this charter that wasn't necessarily intended for that, but I'm a veteran of the banking as a service era where we had Synapse collapse and you know there were consumers uh, because of ledgering
[20:37] issues didn't know where their funds were. I I would I would posit to you that this is potentially a better situation even if um, it's not apples to apples with traditional banking. It is it is something different. Um your sort of reflections on the some of the benefits I guess of the the trust chartering route for for that safety and soundness and protection of consumer funds. >> Yeah, I mean the the bar is extremely high having you know gone through the the process ourselves. Um I would say that the amount of scrutiny into all
[21:08] aspects of subleddgering what goes on chain what stays in our systems all the different controls in place. We're also obviously seeing a lot of you know ramifications to the synapse case right with the the synapse rule of like pushing a lot of the ledgering away from the the fintex and to the banks who are much more regulated as part of the process. And I would say that the the other aspect that is also interesting with the the charter is that it actually now enables financial institutions to
[21:38] rely from a compliance standpoint much more on a federally regulated uh institution compared to a fintex. If you're a bank, for example, or a PSP, you know, an MSB, anything, you can't really rely from a compliance standpoint on another MSB or or MTL licensed company. It has to be a federally regulated entity. And so I think that these two kind of things coming together where the barrier is much higher and then it allows much more companies who otherwise might make mistake to actually
[22:08] rely on the compliance uh risk policies controls of uh of someone who's held at the highest bar is like extremely beneficial generally for for the space and obviously more things pushing on chain is is just generally good for um you know uh uh the the the space in terms of reconciliation systems and accuracy. Yeah, I I I wrote a piece that went out earlier today as we record this um on on Brain Food looking at sort of uh the parallels between sort of the the launch of and their ability to build
[22:38] a bank in minutes um and the early days of banking as a service. And I think uh what has differently is you know it's kind of using stable coins under the hood but I don't believe or I I could be wrong um that there's a trust charted bank under there historically whereas actually if we do get to a world where there are trust chartered banks underneath um then I think there is a uh an organization who is responsible to the federal regulators to prove the state of that ledger and in many cases that may even be the one um that's
[23:08] supporting some of the consumer brands uh at the top in the end of it. So I I hopefully this brings some regulatory clarity and to your point um you just have to ask the guys at Anchorage who I think uh entered a consent order for anti-moneyaundering in 2022 and exited that in 2025. Getting a charter is hard but keeping it is extremely hard and the work really starts when you get that charter. So uh you know good luck to everybody that's doing this and and good luck to the modern treasury guys as well who I think have you made their name in
[23:40] legery. that's that's kind of what they were known for. Then they've added PSPs, they've added stable coins and now the charts, they're sort of becoming really full stack. So this this sort of evolution of fintech into stable coins and trust charters uh is going to be probably the biggest theme for for multiple years to run. Very briefly before we get to part two, I just want to take a quick pause while we hear from our sponsors that make tokenize possible. Stable coin operations usually mean a wallet from one vendor, an on-ramp from another, and then your
[24:10] controls are stitched together across both of them. The Visa stable coin platform fixes this handily. You can mint, move, and manage stable coins, access OpenUSD, and remain your own custodian all in one single shared environment. Then, stable coin linked cards let you spend balances anywhere Visa is accepted. And we know stable kind linked cards are in hyperrowth as our good friend Kai likes to say. That is Visa of course the global leader in payments and of course sponsor of this
[24:42] show. You can find out more at visa.com/crypto. This episode is sponsored by Stripe. Launching a card program used to mean expanding market by market, securing new licenses, new integrations, connecting to new rails in every country you wanted to reach. With Stripe, a single integration can launch a fully customizable stable coinbacked card program across more than 30 market tickets. Your users can spend directly from their stable coin balances anywhere Visa is
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[25:43] number three. Uh Bastion, you might have heard of him as uh will run stable coin accounts in the Samsung wallet across 82 million US Galaxy devices launching in the last week of October of this year. Naz, that's a it's a pretty big user base. Samsung's pretty big company. Um do you want to give us the backstory on this one? >> Yeah, that sounds great. Um so Samsung has been excited about the blockchain technology for quite a bit of time.
[26:13] Initially they had built you know uh hardware capabilities for for blockchain transaction and blockchain wallets a few years ago and actually decided to add stable coins as as part of their Samsung wallet offering as kind of like a a great place for everyone here to hold their funds on any Galaxy phone. they decided to partner with us and and and and Coinbase. We kind of like work jointly. Bastion is kind of like the regulated um service provider. Everything runs under our licenses. We
[26:43] do all the subleuring, orchestration of fund movements, crossber payments as well. We're going to be enabling over 60 countries uh right away at launch for remittances and we partner with with Coinbase on the the you know sub custody leveraging Coinbase institutional for added security of of the funds at rest. And so, yeah, we're going to be launching later this month um to a very large user base and we're going to be expanding, you know, uh over time to other markets as well. >> I'm I'm interested in what you think the
[27:13] attach rates for this would be and what uh the ideal first user wants from this uh stable coins in a Samsung wallet. I mean, we've seen buy now pay later in the Apple wallet. We've seen those wallets are starting to become the everything wallet for consumers. Uh we're in the age now of personal agents. like what what's your thesis on on where consumer wallets go from here? >> I think that the remittance use case is such a powerful one to start with uh within the
[27:43] the Samsung user base. So many people with you know Samsung phones can actually now connect very easily to people all around the world and their family, their friends and more. Um that I would say that this is really kind of use case one and enabling people to have easy access to um to accounts with rewards with you know financial incentives uh and connectivity financial connectivity and then we're going to be adding capabilities to pay at merchants and really just expanding the spendability and the utility of those
[28:14] those accounts uh far beyond what you know what we started with. And so can't share too much on this, but uh we're going to drastically increase the the spendability and the UTD out of those accounts. >> That's that's interesting. Greg, your thoughts on this? I mean, that's quite a quite a distribution there for stable coins. I know consumer is near and dear to your heart. >> Yeah, first congratulations to to N's really exciting uh announcement here. Tom, I think you've said before, every financial product is a decision, a record, a way to reach you, and distribution is king. Um especially in
[28:45] consumer uh we're in the age where distribution is moving from branch to phone to agent. Being able to to reach people um on device is is really really powerful. Um so I think it's really interesting to see how the relationship develops especially um looking at at Samsung and and be able to create those new financial relationships with individuals. >> Again huge congratulations. I mean, sort of uh what does it take to pull off something like this? Because very large company, but they're not your first very large company. Sony's uh Sony Bank's
[29:16] stable coin also runs on uh you is a partnership with yourself. You seem to have carved out a bit of a niche for getting these really big enterprises. You're still a relatively young company. So, like what what's what's the what's the approach here and and how you pulling this off? So the DNA of of Bastion really comes from the problems that we saw firsthand at Meta working on the Libra project. I was, you know, tech leading all of the custody uh and KAC wallet and and crossber payment infrastructure there as well as the the issuance of the liberal currency and got
[29:47] to see problems at a at a scale that only appear within a certain type of companies whether it's like the growth that certain companies are experiencing or the scale that they already have uh with a very broad distribution and so really Bastion I would say has focused on stable coin infrastructure specifically for enterprises um that are you know experiencing certain set of of requirements and need a certain level of security compliance but then I would say just integrations
[30:18] that work for them and so that is really I would say our focus as you mentioned Sony uh is going to be leveraging us uh not just for issuance for custody on and offend corporate use cases retail facing use cases very excited about you know broadening the the Sony ecosystem we have more very large companies that you guys can't announce them yet but um I'm very excited about that because it it is clear that the enterprises the largest companies in the world are very excited about stable coins. They don't ask anymore what can do what can stable
[30:48] coins do for me. They actually understand it and it's more about how do I go about uh um launching that? Where do I partner? What do I build myself? Where do I obtain my own licenses? Where do I um leverage someone else's license? As you know, Sony, for example, decided to obtain their own charter via connect trust, whereas Samsung fully relies on Bastion's licenses. Super interesting to see this model emerge, but also a specialist in dealing with really large enterprises kind of pulling off these deals. Uh, you know, you would have
[31:19] expected in the enterprise space, it would be somebody big with distribution, you know, sort of I'm thinking about publicly traded companies doing solving this sort of problem. Um but actually sometimes it's just the experience of having been there and done it before makes such a difference. So hats off to you guys. Um and whilst we're doing sort of the the victory lap here, we should talk about um Spyo, which uh you know, Paul, you might know a little bit about those guys. You you of course run tokenized cash funds uh in four different currencies. You raised more than a $90 million series B led by NEA
[31:50] um as your assets hit $2.7 billion. So tell me the story of this asset growth and the company just reset for everybody what are you what do you do and and what are the assets? >> Sure. Um so we started this company two years ago that's when we launched our first products. Um we operate from Europe um where there is actually a massive product gap I would say when it comes to access to cash funds compared to the US. If you look at the US uh the money market industry as a whole is like I think more than 8 trillion uh US
[32:20] dollars at this point in time. And the ratio of like assets that sit in MMF divided by bank deposit is north of 40%. Um so it's massive market. Um it's 7x smaller more than 7x smaller in Europe where the market is essentially dominated by banks. So most of the money supply sits in in bank deposits. It's fine but you usually not earning any yield similar to the US I think on checking accounts. And when you want access to yield your opport I mean your the product that you are being offered is a term deposit. you have to tie up
[32:51] your cash for 3 months, 6 months, 12 months. It's fine and it can be quite interesting when the yield curve is upward sloping, but it's not for all of your cash, right? Uh you need some cash to stay liquid. Uh hence money market funds, right? Um so the first thing we are solving is just um this product gap issue and access to money market funds. And we've decided um from the very beginning to build everything on chain because it's a better way um to facilitate access to these products. um to to the previous discussion on you
[33:21] know equities in emerging markets for instance um so that's what we are solving first um and then there are a lot of interesting things to be built um even for the US markets I believe if you look at money market funds in the US most still work with one cut off per day which means that you often to wait several hours before having your cash start earning any yield um and then when you want access to your cash it's the same issue the other way around you need to wait for several hours to get access um so we are working on the fun machinery if you want to enable 24/7 a
[33:52] call of yield um and instant access to your cash 24/7 whatever currency that's a super exciting problem a few folks are working in on this it's challenging everything is not solved by blockchain and tokensization by the way it's a lot of accounting issues market issues um but that's a very exciting problem and the last thing that I would mention that we very much like that we are super bullish on is just unlocking also programmability When it comes to treasury workflows, uh most cash allocations today are super manual. You
[34:23] have like a treasurer deciding on you know which uh term deposits or which money market funds to allocate the cash into. We want to automate that basically uh for treasurers for agents tomorrow. Uh and on this tokenization is super interesting because you have you know your money as sitting in a smart contract with a stable coin for instance and also your cash funds which is a smart contract and it's very easy to um you know uh have rules that enable instant allocation of your stable coins into the fund if you have 24/7 yield it's instant ac etc. So that's the sort
[34:54] of stuff we are working on from for now from Europe where the product gap is um uh very big and it makes it um quite new on the market um and potentially hopefully global at some point including in the US uh where these issues also exist to some extent. Yeah, I remember uh this company in the US called Meow that came out and did this in a very trfy way and did really well um kind of on on the back of that and um there are some fintech applications like Wise that offer Black Rockck money market funds but you know for the corporate treasurer
[35:24] uh they're less likely to be using Wise they're probably using a large bank so to have something like this that's uh it's kind of giving them that. Um what I found interesting as well is you support euros, dollars, pounds and Swiss Franks which I guess for the European region is is is hugely beneficial. Um and you've got the uh Spyo Amundi overnight swap fund uh which by itself reached a billion assets in July. So do you want to talk to me about um sort of uh some of some of the different funds here and uh kind of some of the some of the roles
[35:54] of uh the different geographies and and countries that that fit within your portfolio. Yeah, to your point like the sort of multicurrency angle is super important for us because um as opposed to the US, Europe is very fragmented, right? There is I mean there is the euro which is the the single currency but in effect like uh countries in the Nordics, in Eastern Europe, etc. still have their own currencies for for the majority of them and then you have the UK, Switzerland and etc. So and the USD of course for everything international. Um so for us um starting with products in
[36:26] multiple countries was very important. uh and this is where we differentiated first from our US peers who only have cash funds in in USD and then on the type of products um we started with super vignia money market funds only investing in T bills and that was like super important very transparent etc uh and then we started uh working with more and more treasurers and um receiving um you know um having demands for other products basically so for now we still only operate in the uh if you overnight
[36:59] sub daily uh liquid part of the treasury landscape. Uh but there are many different products to be built there. Term products, fixedterm products also yield strategies that are a bit more um risky like cash and carry trades for instance but are very hard to access and quite interesting for for treasures that have more cash. So that's uh how we are seeing the road map launching more and more products in this in this space in this space sorry along the sort of term and risk um axis and the spyo amundi
[37:30] overnight swap fund um specifically is quite interesting because it leverages the balance sheet of of very large banks. Today we worked with BNP Pariba but we could work with some of the largest US banks in the in the future and you enter effectively into a total return swap with these banks whereby you hold um instruments for them like equities for instance they want exposure to and then you swap the performance of the equities basket against a predetermined yield predetermined yield sorry that is being offered by the bank and by doing so you are enable to you are able sorry to beat um the risk-free
[38:00] rates and the money market yields. So that makes it quite a compelling product as long as you're comfortable with the credit risk of the banking quarter party effectively and when it's a very very large banks. Um it's uh something that you know is quite quite you know common actually because most people have money in banks. So and I think this is the sort of stuff that um in TRDFI the largest corporate treasuries have known about for for quite some time. Um, but I think this hourly yield acrruel or even real-time yield acrruel um that's 24/7
[38:32] accessible uh and just going straight after the corporate treasuries is really interesting as an approach. Greg, your thoughts on this story? [laughter] >> Yeah, I mean I I really think it's interesting how you can abstract away the complexity in the back end um to provide that end customer the experience. I can't wait to try it. Um, but really just is letting individuals, consumers put your money to work for you, having programmable money from a product perspective. Sweeps get simpler is a lot more useful for onchain collateral, moving money in and out the same day, no longer costing individual
[39:02] yield. Um, and so really really putting the speed of uh the underlying technology into real use cases at the end of the day. >> I I think that would be interesting actually to take this corporate treasury approach and see if you could um kind of power it down to a consumer level. Um, obviously, uh, it's a little bit easier selling to corporates than it is to consumers, but with personal agents now. Um, I imagine Morse could do some really interesting things with with what, um, Speaker's got under the hood. Um, you know, I would love an agent that's sweeping my cash in and out of money
[39:33] market funds um, depending on the time of day and depending like, do I really need um, the amount sitting in my current account, my checking account, uh, or is that just there to cover the the month of potential bills that might occur? So uh yeah, interesting to watch. N your your thoughts on on uh on Speedo's story. >> So first and foremost, congratulations. Really really uh excited for for you guys and and seeing like the the the very very rapid growth. Um something that I'm actually quite excited about. I
[40:03] know that we talk a lot about stable coins being the future money. I'm actually pretty excited about uh tokenized money market funds being used for settlement and as payment instruments. Uh ultimately stable coins are going to be basically money market funds and and overnight rebirth repos with a a buffer of cash right for for redemption uh uh requirements. And so I'm actually pretty excited about those um like future money movements that actually happen natively with a tokenized money market fund. I also hope that we make it easier for transparently
[40:35] regulated money transmitters to use uh or hold money market funds and without necessarily kind of like a lot of the the securities kind of like uh implications for it. Um because ultimately it's a it's it it is also going to be part of money uh to certain extent. So I'm very very excited about that. very excited about funds that are highly accessible and can be embitted within accounts for wealth uh building uh for individuals as well as treasury corporate treasury use cases for uh businesses that you know have stock
[41:06] liquidity everywhere around the world basically and we see that all the time. >> Paul, who's your ideal client profile sort of uh size and scope of company? Um where are they operating? What type of business are they? >> It's a great question. Um so we started with tech companies but now um we have really diversified away. Um I mean we still have a lot of uh tech companies obviously but also very traditional SMBs uh public institutions, financial institutions. Outside the ICP um is a client that has between five and 100 million in cash um and you know quite a
[41:39] relatively short um sort of decision cycle as well. uh because in the business of funds you want to grow your AUM fast and the more AUM you have the bigger the client you can target uh because the largest most sophisticated treasurers will have limits you know they will not want to own more than five or 10% of EUM of a fund so for us uh it was quite obvious when we launched it that we had to go um first with the like the smallest businesses um sometimes it's even um a company with a single decision maker um on on this and then
[42:11] gradually um up the value chain if you want and diversify from startups to many different types of clients and today we have like 10k businesses on the platform um Europeans only um a few beyond Europe but we don't serve US persons yet um because of regulatory constraints but uh that might uh change when we get the right license I mean very wide um sort of client base in terms of profile but concentrated among SMBs >> so interested to watch what happens next with you guys um we did have a couple of
[42:41] stories we didn't have time to cover in full depth this week. One of which was the S&P launching uh risk scores for onchain lending vaults. Uh Paul, I do want to ask you your thoughts on that one because you did mention the rating agencies not taking this seriously a couple of years ago. What what's the importance of things like that? >> Super important. I'll give you a practical example with us because we just got the AAF uh rating for our fund actually last week. Um so it's quite quite fresh news. Um and so we've been through this process with S&P global
[43:11] ratings actually of um you know getting the spike one with the overnight swap fund rated. It was very important for some clients uh that actually required this this rating. Um so really important that you know the AY's stance towards um the use of blockchain of tok to tokenization for um sort of ledger management has changed on that perspective and now the fact that they are looking also at vault is really really interesting because it's obviously a super interesting technology to build new types of funds allocates into defi as well um so we are following
[43:44] that very closely >> yeah na you did you see this story and I guess it's kind of crossed your radar as Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're uh spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of like spectrum of yield uh ranging from, you know, very simple uh reserve yield uh you know, from issuing your own stable coin versus partnering with, let's say, open USD or some existing uh stable coin or joining a consortium versus more complex financial products and like vaults for example on
[44:14] chain and so on. Um and obviously you kind of like take on different counterparty risk. I think that this is great news because of the large companies that we think that we talk to think about counterparty risk all the time and rating essentially on vaults and and funds is basically what is part of the the equation of that prevents them from you know going to the the end of the slider on on DeFi I would say. So really excited for just stamps of approval on those financial products
[44:44] that uh really help them think through the you know the the the the scale of of risk that they take on. >> Yeah, rating agencies aren't perfect. We've seen in financial crisis you know that that uh they're not always but they are still the the least worst option we have to understand uh the risk of an asset and uh they they do act as a good proxy I think for a corporate's ability to move. Uh do you think uh Greg that we'll see similar sorts of initiatives for for consumers buying things? I know earn buttons have become a real thing in
[45:14] consumer applications lately. Um and would you like 5% or 7% yield and do you know where that's coming from? And uh you know is this figure prime underneath the hood or is it some vault? Is there some looping defy going on here? And as as Naz was alluding to there on the risk curve, how do you think about that? Is there a role for thoughtful product builders on what gets out to consumers, do you think? >> Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like bu in building trust, it's it's a two-way street. Um and you have to earn it every single day, but you can lose it in an
[45:44] instant. And so if you're really building for the long term, um making clear for the customer what is underneath the hood um and that you don't have a mystery meat sauce um under there. as we keep on seeing with these developments really the the line between a stored value balance um and an investment product blurs um making sure that you know what you what you're holding for a consumer is it held in USD is it something else but at the end of the day um really opening up this participation um for for this end customers is is happening quickly
[46:14] >> yeah certainly something we've seen at Tempo is that uh once you can stick an earn button on something uh whether it's corporates MSBs uh or or consumer remittance businesses is they they get the business case straight away. um you know with uh direct custody of stable coins uh with the ability to essentially through the white label uh yield sharing potentially earn some some revenue there but also with the own there's some some further spread that you can take on that and the consumer feels like they're getting a great deal on you know what was historically you know maybe a bank
[46:45] account or a local bank giving you nothing now you can be getting three four 5% um and it's US dollar backed and and so we've seen that fly off the shelves um and a lot of demand from uh fintech companies to have a bit of handholding. Now, as a bit similar to yourself, you know, at Tempo, we spend a lot of time with the corporates really on the education and the FDE sort of approach, but as much on the solution edge side more than anything, in fact, it's it's helping people understand, you know, what is this product? How do you get comfortable with compliance? What
[47:16] are the differences between these funds? How do you separate them all? And I think that's going to be um the big area now. A lot of companies are stable curious and token curious, but uh can you guide them by the hand and and answer all of those gnarly risk questions and uh uh things that come under the hood? All right. Well, I'm going to I'm going to pause it here cuz um we could list off the rest of the news and keep going for hours, I'm sure, but um I do want to thank everybody so much for participating in today's conversation. Naz, I'm going to start with you. If people want to get a hold of Bastion um and they want to learn
[47:47] more about what you do, where do they go to do that? Yeah, Bastion on uh on X uh and and on LinkedIn. Uh Nasiweezy is is is my um uh my handle OnX. Very excited that for more conversations if you're building in the stable coin space and you're a large or fast growing company, just you know, hit me up and and I will respond. >> Uh Greg, how about yourself? >> Yeah, you can reach me at Greg at Morseoney um Morseoney for for X or on Instagram. Um you can find me on XG Bria
[48:17] >> and look forward to it. All right. And and Paul, how about you? And Spyo, >> same. X or LinkedIn. Um on X, Spyro Finance. Um available on LinkedIn. Email is pa um ul um adrienper.io. >> Right. Well, definitely look out for spiker.io. I think we're going to hear a lot more from you. We're going to hear a lot more from uh from Morbastian as well. If you want to hear a lot more of this podcast, you should go ahead and subscribe. You should like and you should leave us a review. You should do all of those things. It really really helps us. Um, and if you want to find more from me, I'm sailor on all of the
[48:49] socials at brainfood.xyz where I be ranting regularly and of course at tempo.xyz where we're changing the [music] way money moves one day at a time. Thank you very much and we'll catch you next time.