Michael Shaulov on payment networks
From Money 20/20 EU: Michael Shaulov of Fireblocks on Stablecoins, AI, and the Future of Money Movement · · New York Stock Exchange
“The main question will actually come once we will see alongside both the PSPs and the merchants where they are willing to accept stable coins and we have those wallets and then we will see basically an account to account transfer of stable coins or account to a merchant transfer stable coins and that can potentially disintermediate fully what Visa and Mastercard have been building and their empire and their network.”
On , Michael Shaulov, CEO & Co-Founder at Fireblocks, spoke about payment networks during Money 20/20 EU: Michael Shaulov of Fireblocks on Stablecoins, AI, and the Future of Money Movement on New York Stock Exchange.
About Michael Shaulov
Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, has been active in media appearances discussing the company's role in stablecoin infrastructure. At Money 20/20 Europe in June 2025, Shaulov said that the GENIUS Act in the United States had "unleash[ed] this crazy adoption" of stablecoins among fintechs, payment companies, and banks. He noted that Fireblocks was processing about $6 trillion per year in digital asset volume, with stablecoins accounting for 65% of that, up from roughly 40% a year earlier. Shaulov also announced the launch of Fireblocks Flow, a product he described as allowing payment companies, merchants, and fintechs to accept and send stablecoins in a manner similar to what Plaid did for traditional payments. In May 2026, Shaulov discussed Fireblocks' partnership with Western Union to power its first stablecoin, USDPT. He stated that Fireblocks was providing the wallet infrastructure, concentration layer, and the ability to move assets from the U.S. and Europe to Latin America, Africa, and APAC. Shaulov described this as a "generational modernization" for Western Union's infrastructure, moving from technologies built in the 1970s to blockchain-based rails. He also said that Fireblocks was working on more than 30 RFPs across tier-one and tier-two banks globally, and that he believed banks would be the next wave of adopters for digital assets, including stablecoins, tokenized securities, and tokenized commodities.