Yes, I think that honestly for stable coins in the US the most important things were already made. The Genius Act and the Genius Act was basically unleash this crazy adoption that we are seeing among the fintechs, among the payment companies, among the banks, and now propagates actually to the corporate world and the users.
Welcome, here we are at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam and I'm very pleased to be joined by Michael Shaulov, who is CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks. Michael, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks for having me here.
So, you know, it's been a very busy morning. We're halfway through day one. What are the top things you've heard here at Money 2020? What are you most excited about?
Well, I think like every Money 2020, it's fascinating for us because we come here and we see the evolution from year to year. Well, I think it's like the fourth year that we're doing it or fifth year that we're doing it at a company and it's pretty wild to see how the industry came along in terms of adopting digital assets and specifically stable coins. You know, every year it's just a completely different climate in terms of the type of companies we meet, the type of clients we have, the type of discussions you're able to have on this topic and clearly like this year it's been like the peak since we started.
Absolutely. I mean, you think it can't get bigger and then here it is even dominating the topic even more, perhaps only really in competition with AI and agentic AI on the stable coins payments points and to do with institutional adoption. What do you think, apart from the Money 2020 programming, what do you think are the signals for where the adoption is going, how quickly it's going, what progress is being made?
Yeah, so we are now, it's actually quite interesting. So, Fireblocks right now is processing $6 trillion per year of digital asset volume. About a year ago, 40 something percent of that was stable coin. Now, it's 65%. So, out of that is basically we are at a $3.5, almost 4 trillion per year and only goes for Fireblocks and we are about like 10% of all the onchain transactions. Now it's also interesting to see that there is a very strong shift from stable coins being used for trading cryptos. That's actually like how, you know, not many people aware but the way that stable coin and specifically Tether started is by helping facilitating trading or the settlement leg of it. Now about 30% of it is already payment companies using stable coins to move assets cross-chain. Right, and last 12 months it was the first time that USDC surpassed the, from percentage wise, the volume of Tether on our platform.
Yeah, I mean it's really interesting news and to see that kind of moving alongside the regulatory landscape where I know we've got different jurisdictions that we're going to need to cover. Let's start with what's going on in the US because USDC is obviously what we're paying attention to there. The regulatory landscape in the US and what everyone's waiting for in the Clarity Act to figure out this yield conversation. What's your take on the direction there?
Yes, I think that honestly for stable coins in the US the most important things were already made. The Genius Act and the Genius Act was basically unleash this crazy adoption that we are seeing among the fintechs, among the payment companies, among the banks, and now propagates actually to the corporate world and to users. In the last 6 months or so we onboarded all the big remitters, Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria Finance, and all those guys are now using stable coins. Clarity Act is still clearly the open question and it mostly applies to I would say how aggressively the banks would lean in or how much friction they will actually put behind this topic. My personal opinion actually doesn't matter and I think that the banks misunderstand the whole notion of stable coins. The main reason for that is that it actually doesn't matter if they do tokenized deposits or stable coin in a system that you can subscribe in real time into money market funds and with everything that is actually happening from a tokenization standpoint on the capital market front like the DTCC project with Canton and so on. If you're a user and it actually comes together with AI and you have some kind of programmable element, you would never leave assets idle, right? So, this algorithm or you as a user, you don't need to wait 2 days to deposit your money into some kind of saving account. All this friction is gone. So users will accrue interest directly from whatever money they have with the financial institution whether it will happen through stable coins or whether it will happen by depositing and redeeming them from to a money market fund. So I think that the business model of the banks will be under a lot of pressure and will have to evolve regardless of this entire discussion around the Clarity Act which is just like a funny debate between two CEOs that I think creating more views than necessary because one of them doesn't understand exactly that his business model is going to change.
Right, absolutely. And you know that changing business model based on consumer demand is always what we like to see rather than anything.
Yeah. They forget who is the user and what the users want.
Exactly. And speaking of that changing business model, how do you know the people who the companies that controlled the rails previously, Visa, Mastercard, etc., how do they fit into this landscape and how are they using stable coins?
