Hi everybody. This is the last fireside chat, the last actual event of WallCon. We're gonna have a couple words from Pedro before we maybe all head downstairs for some drinks in a minute. But it's very much like last but definitely not least. I've been very excited, mostly because Michelle and I had a wonderful chat last night. I'm hoping drinks over a glass always gets better over drinks. We could have had a glass of wine. It's almost 5:00 PM. Next time I bring you on stage, I'll have a bottle of wine here. Absolutely. Anyway, I'm really excited about this because one of the big trends happening right now is in the stablecoin space. We've just seen the first billion-dollar acquisition of a crypto company, and that's to do with stablecoins. We have seen so much demand. On the panel a minute ago, we were talking about Tether using stablecoins to buy all. This is one of the spaces where crypto truly has product-market fit right now. So I'm really excited to dive into that. Michelle, I've spoken a lot for the last 30 seconds. Tell us who you are.
Sure. Hi everybody. I know it's 4:00 PM and one of the last fireside chats, so I'll make this hopefully fruitful and exciting for most of you or some of you. My name is Genie Lim. I'm based in Singapore and the executive director for Paxos, running APAC in Singapore. Not new to cryptocurrency. I just joined five months ago, but previously I was at Meta. I ran Novi Wallet. I know it was such an exciting project at the time with Libra Network and all. Unfortunately during my days it got deprecated. But hey, I'm here. Paxos is running a whole new network, whole new distribution partners. So I'm very, very excited to share probably not details right now, but over drinks. And I have my Tim, my product manager who built this whole product, so kudos to him, a lot of sleepless nights. But yeah, happy to chat more.
And you had another really exciting announcement this week in Singapore. Tell us maybe a little bit more about that. Personally I love it, and I'll tell you why, but let's hear what it is.
Sure. So you may have heard at Singapore Fintech Festival we launched GDN, so it's Global Dollar Network or USDG. The US basically, it's our new listing. What does that mean? Because we have USDP, which is more of a US dollar-based stablecoin product, and then we also launched USDL, which is a yield product mainly targeting users in emerging markets that don't have access to US dollar bank accounts or T-bills. And then we also have PAXG, which is truly digital gold. I'm actually personally very excited about that product. Anybody that cannot afford to buy a whole gold bar, we have PAXG, which is a tokenized digital gold, which is amazing. Again, providing access to folks in the world that cannot afford the whole thing. And then most recently we had PYUSD, which is a PayPal US dollar stablecoin. Who knew that a traditional finance company would be interested in launching a stablecoin with us? With the partnership, with our help we white-label that product for them. We hit $1 billion market cap this year a few months ago, and super excited for that. And now GDN. So what does that mean and what's the difference between all the other products in this one? So GDN or USDG, we decided to change the commercial economics for the whole ecosystem. As you can see, our competitors like USDT, USDC, they're all great stablecoins. Total volume today is about $170 billion. So obviously that's a use case, but I'm pretty sure that majority of the revenue is pretty much kept by the issuer today with USDC and USDT. So what we decided to do is to do a little bit differently, to basically bring all our partners like payments companies, Nuvei, Robinhood, Galaxy, you name it, whoever wants to join us in the distribution partner network. We decided to share majority of our revenue back and distribute to our partners for the fact that you are minting, burning, distributing, accepting all along the ecosystem. Basically we're going to be rewarding you. So that is the major difference between the new product and all the other products out there today.
That's awesome. I think it's awesome for a couple reasons personally. I think that we have a ton of different assets. We've talked actually all day about fragmentation, about chain abstraction, about gas abstraction. I think at some point somebody's going to need to do stablecoin abstraction because we'll have so many. And so what I really love about this is the main motivation for most people to launch their stablecoin is because they earn the yield, right? That's how every other stablecoin works. And so what I like about this is that I think it creates incentives for people to say, actually I can get pretty much the same, if not maybe marginally less, but pretty much the same economics from launching my own stablecoin as I can from participating in the Global Dollar Network. And I think that's really important not only because it solves this fragmentation issue, and there are some technical solutions to that like maybe you could say it's fine to have a thousand different stablecoins in a chain-abstracted world because we'll be able to use them all kind of interoperably, but I think the key difference for the end user, for new consumers, it's going to become really confusing. Like what is the difference between USDC? How are they going to identify all of this? And so I love the idea that you've brought all of these partners together to launch USDG. So congratulations.
Thank you. And many more to come. I think ever since we launched at SFF Singapore Fintech Festival last week, for those of you who joined us, you would have seen the amount of buzz and excitement. The different partners now want to join us, whether it's asset managers, payments companies, TradFi, or what we call traditional finance, traditional payments folks wanted to get in now to join us because they don't know what it is, but they want to know how they can get in on the stablecoin project or pay in to disrupt the traditional Visa Mastercards of the world. So I think that's a huge success for us.
Okay, this is where it gets spicy. You just said we're going to disrupt the Visa Mastercard networks of the world. How are we going to do that and why?
So this is not Paxos's opinion, this is Genie's opinion. So the reason why I joined Paxos, or join the crypto firm away from a very comfortable lifestyle at Meta, Google, is because I truly believe that in the world of payments, and I've been in payments for a long time, I'm not going to age myself but it's been a long time. I worked for Worldpay, I worked for First Data. And our key partners are the networks, what you call the regime of Visa, Mastercard, American Express. They're great, but at the same time, when I started my career in payments I was a pricing analyst when I studied interchange. And what that means is when Visa charges a fee to accept, for a merchant to accept debit card or a credit card, I couldn't understand why it's up to 3.5 freaking percent for the merchant, right? So to me, logically from a mathematics point of view, if you are going to pay a merchant cash debit card which is directly coming out from your bank account, why should the merchant, you know, the merchant of the world, why do they have to pay 1.8 to 3.5% versus a credit card which I understand the concept of is just borrowing money? But why? And why do Visa and Mastercard get majority of the revenue back into their pocket while the SMBs, the small medium businesses in United States, Australia, and even worse Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, you're talking emerging markets, they don't get the most, the money in the pocket, and consumers have to suffer, right? Have to pay more for goods. I think that's one of the reasons that I love crypto so much, because when you take that and you're like, how can they charge that? Why do people pay that? The answer is trust, right? People are prepared to pay that for convenience because it means anybody out there with a Visa or a Mastercard can come. You're not trying to use many different payment methods. And trust because the money doesn't instantly make it from someone's bank account into the merchant's bank account, but the merchant says, actually this is okay, I'm okay with the delay because I trust Visa and I trust Mastercard.
Absolutely, they trust Visa and Mastercard, and they trust the bank that's funding them. Correct. And this is the beauty of this technology that we have here: it's trustless, right? Firstly, it's instantaneous. We can move money instantly, but secondly, we don't need a trusted third party. And so this whole concept of being able to extract 3% rent on a transaction should disappear. Yeah. And you're right, I think that's what makes it so exciting because when businesses are operating on super thin margins, payments actually makes a wild difference. Like when I was operating in payments, we had this realization that we used to sell to the tech people in the room like it's better technology, then you realize sell to the CFO because if I can increase your payment acceptance by this much or your pricing by this much, it makes a huge difference. And I think that we're about to see wild disruption on that front.
I totally agree. And I think, can I share the recent partnership with Stripe? So this is, and Tim will know about this as well. So recent partnership with Stripe that actually made them buy Bridge, separate company, what they do is very different. So what we have learned with our Stripe partnership is we have so much interest, and this is United States, we're testing in United States only. Even within a couple of months, we saw organic movement into the stablecoins pay-in. So meaning that all the gaming merchants, for example, are telling the consumers, we want you to pay in with USDP. We don't even care if it's USDC to be honest, because we're providing the platform to do that. And a lot of that have migrated. Consumers have migrated onto to buy from the merchant for two reasons. A, from the merchant, they don't pay Visa Mastercard interchange. It's like 1.8% for domestic, if it's international it's like north of 3% from all these cross-border fees, right? Two, it basically taps into new users that domestic US merchants have never been able to tap because stablecoins are borderless. Someone from Egypt or India, if they have a wallet and they want to buy from a US merchant, they can through Stripe.
I think it's awesome. I'm also, side note because I'm going to ask you another question in a second, but I also think that the payouts use case is really exciting because these are people who maybe don't have crypto today, but they also maybe struggle to get a bank account in some places. And so they're on creative platforms, they find it hard to get money off their $100 that they've made on a creative platform. By the time it makes it to their bank account in a cross-border way, it's now like $74 or something because it's gone through three different networks in five days and it's a bank holiday. So they just can't get their cash. Like this is going to happen instantly. And I think it's super exciting.
