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Yesterday I had the opportunity to moderate a panel for American Banker’s virtual stablecoin summit.
Obviously, the audience that the panel catered to was more TradFi than crypto, but my panelists included a16z Crypto’s Sam Broner, EY’s Paul Brody, Halliday’s Griffin Dunaif and Superstate’s Robert Leshner, which meant we could cover a wide variety of topics.
Anecdotally, one of my takeaways was that there’s a lot of interest and appetite for stablecoins. And the base level of knowledge is pretty high for folks who are presumably not crypto-native. One of the highlights for me was the infra talk, even if it’s not necessarily the most attractive topic.
But back to the panel itself: Brody, who’s EY’s global blockchain leader, told me that they’ve estimated that if they moved all of EY’s payments from the traditional systems to crypto rails, it would save them a $100 million a year. (He added that they can’t do that, because of regulations.)
Even for EY, $100 million isn’t a small amount.
Dunaif, at one point, also brought up that “the stablecoin moment” opens the door for “the Amazon Web Services moment” in finance.
“I think one of the most exciting properties of a blockchain is that we’re making our commercial systems, our finance systems, look a lot more like data systems and traditional [software as a service] systems. So what that means is that value suddenly becomes a programming primitive, right? It’s in the runtime itself,” he explained.
So there’s the potential for a bank or a FinTech to offer a service akin to what AWS does for the cloud.
“There’s probably not a whole lot of margins in just the stablecoin itself, but in the services you could add on top,” he added.
While I think the overall thought has been that stablecoin rails could clean up and simplify the preexisting system, Brody noted that the infrastructure may look “just as complicated” as what was there previously, but “it might be much more contestable, much more open, much more competitive.”
Don’t get too excited, though. Broner still thinks we’re a few years out, even with the uptick in demand and regulatory potential. He believes the adoption will be slow, but it’s coming. It’s not just the EYs of the world that are looking to be more efficient and save money; there are plenty of smaller firms that would love to save money on things like international money transfers.
And that’s your vibe check this wonderful Thursday.
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