Stablecoins That Settle In Minutes

In this episode of Stable Pulse, host Dante Reminick sits down with Avinash Chidambaram, Founder and CEO of Cybrid, to explore why stablecoins represent a fundamental shift in how money moves. While today's payment systems send information instantly, the movement of value still depends on slow settlement, correspondent banks, and legacy infrastructure. Stablecoins change that by moving payment and settlement together on-chain.

Dante and Avinash break down what this means in practice, from B2B supplier payments and cross-border remittances to real-time treasury management, guaranteed FX, and faster access to funds. They also unpack the often-overlooked infrastructure behind enterprise stablecoin payments, including compliance, KYB, transaction monitoring, wallet screening, fraud controls, and banking partnerships that make these systems work at scale.

Finally, they discuss where stablecoin adoption is accelerating, how regulation such as the GENIUS Act is shaping trust in the ecosystem, and why the future of global payments may be powered by stablecoin rails, even if most users never realize it.

Connect with the Host and Guest:

Dante Reminik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dante-reminick / https://x.com/DanteReminick

Avinash Chidambaram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avinashchidambaram/

About Stable Pulse

Stable Pulse is a fast-paced, news-driven podcast covering the most important developments shaping the stablecoin and digital asset ecosystem. Each episode dives into timely conversations with industry leaders, operators, and policymakers, offering sharp insights and real-world perspectives on where the market is heading. With a focus on clarity and relevance, Stable Pulse breaks down complex topics into accessible, actionable takeaways for anyone building in or exploring the future of finance.

Transcript

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Intro

Intro 0:00

Passage of the stable coin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act. Because analysts say a wave of competition could complicate things. Stablecoin issue of debut right here at the Nasdaq today.

Dante Reminick 0:13

Everyone, welcome to another episode of Stable Pulse. We have a very special guest here. Avinash, very, very excited to have you on today. Um, as part of sort of the the running historical flow of this podcast, we always, always, always start out with a section that I call braggadocious. And the reason that I call it braggadocious is because all I want you to do is brag about yourself. We're gonna use this as a little bit of an intro, but I don't want it to be a humble intro. I want you to tell everyone a little bit about you and a little bit about what you are building. Uh and like I said, leave humility at the door, please.

Avinash’s Journey Through Payments

Avinash Chidambaram 0:50

All right. Uh so about me, I started out as a developer and then eventually aligned at a company called Blackberry. You might remember it, you might not. Um really focused on um the cryptographic side of the business. And you know, my first job there was to try and figure out how we can implement an identity platform across all Blackberry services, and then I was asked to take care of uh wallets and payments. So figuring out how you can do payments in 138 countries on your Blackberry, buy apps on a on a BlackBerry, that sort of thing. And then um so that was a great project, you know, um large-scale global um kind of uh program. And of course, you know, Blackberry had its challenges. Uh I landed a company called Interact, which is a debit network, one is a product called eTransfer, exactly the same as Zo. And uh Interact builds infrastructure for the big banks. And uh when the Apple Pay was launched, if you remember, Apple came, Apple went to Canada after the US, and so my job there was to build out the token platform, integrate it to all the big banks, and launch Apple Pay on debit in Canada. Another massive project, you know, it's kind of cool to see it pass like billion transactions and things like that. So a lot of large-scale infrastructure figuring out how to integrate it to core banking infrastructure. And then uh decided I'm gonna do a startup. If I wasn't gonna do it then, I was never gonna do it. And uh so I did my first startup in the embedded lending space, focused on trade finance. Um, we built a platform that helped um businesses extend 30, 60, 90 days of credit to their to their customers, um, typically small business customers. So it was a big data uh uh services business where we would look at customers' transactions, look at their bank statements, and say, hey, you you should give this this person credit. But instead of it coming off of the balance sheet of the business that's selling the goods, like if you're a roofing manufacturer, you'd put our infrastructure in to extend credit to roofers, and we would originate that to a number of uh organizations uh from banks to subprime lenders. And that company was acquired uh by a private equity company. And uh so sort of our first exit. Um, yeah, it was a great experience. I learned a lot about how to do a startup. And then while we were kind of um you know, when I was at that company, one of the things that happened to me is that my brother had a had a child, and my brother lives in Japan. And uh so this is like shortly after the COVID thing in 2022, 2023. You know, like you can't easily send money to someone from your banking app. And so I called them up and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna send you some Bitcoin. Like, that's the fastest way for me to do it. And he's like, okay, what do I do? I was like, yeah, download this wallet and hang on a second, and then I sent it to him. Um and it kind of like sparked this idea, right? It's like, holy shit, I just sent this, I just sent my brother money on the other side of the world in seconds. And all that that knowledge, all that infrastructure we work with, all the intermediaries that we've had to work with to do a payment. Um you know, it just kind of is a bit of a revelation. You're like, holy crap, I can send anybody money anywhere in the world. And so that's how the that was the genesis of cyber. So we put together a little app said about, is it possible for us to acquire digital asset and send it to someone? And um, you know, that's how we started. And then it became super obvious that the way to do that is on stable coins, because of course, like, you know, sending Bitcoin obviously sent that a few years ago. Uh sent him about $1,000 worth of Bitcoin. I'm not sure what it's actually worth now, but it's a lot more than $1,000. I'm sure he wished that he didn't spend it all either. Um but you know, you do that on stable coins and it starts to become very obvious and interesting use case. And that was the genesis of our business. And so we started Cybrid to figure out how we can enable cross-border payments using stablecoin rails. And we've continued to build out the platform to enable that for our businesses and for consumers. Like we support businesses that do remittances and businesses that do cross-border payments. And we're really focused on making that experience as seamless as possible, leveraging stable coins, either pay someone in stablecoins or pay someone in their local currency and do that in minutes. You know, our goal is guaranteeing our goal is that you should be able to be on the phone and send you money, and there you go, you've gotten it.

Dante Reminick 5:17

That's

Messaging Networks Versus On Chain

Dante Reminick 5:18

really interesting. And I want to backtrack a little bit before we dive into cybridge too much, which is you very clearly have had a successful career in building out traditional payment systems. Now you are building out sort of a modern payment system on-chain with stable coins. As the builder and the operator behind this, what's the difference between building out Apple Pay in Canada and you know building out payment systems that interact, and then now needing to build out a stablecoin payment network?

Avinash Chidambaram 5:48

I think one of the big things is like when you look at you know card networks, you look at Swift, you look at these kinds of organizations, they're they're all messaging layers. They don't actually enable the transfer of value. So you know, even in a in a you know multi-party card network, i the two counterparties who are trying to pay each other are using essentially a tokenized count on the card and saying, I authorize that I can make this payment to this other merchant. And then that information gets sent to Visa, which then goes and checks with the bank, is there enough money or is there enough credit for this user? And then they send that same information to the merchant to say this this transaction was authorized, all that has to happen over a certain period of time. And then afterwards, this settlement that happens where you know the organ, you know, basically the issuing bank says, okay, I've already authorized all these transactions, but I'm gonna go and send this money to an account that Visa tells me I have to go and send it to. Then Visa turns around and says, Okay, I'm gonna send it to the acquire bank that the merchant has. And so the movement of money is completely dislodged from the actual information travel. Whereas when we look at the way you do these things now, we the the two are compressed together. Like the movement of money and the information travels together into on-chain. When you send somebody a transaction, you can see on-chain instantly that it was received in their wallet. It's like I actually sent the money over there. You can turn around and start spending it. It's actually yours. And so all of that infrastructure that's built, all these layers of communications, all these layers of data that's that are created to send information back and forth between parties is compressed down to it's actually all already on the blockchain. You can see that the money was sent from A to B. The authorization was done by the sender. I'm on my wallet, I've authorized with it with my cryptographic key to say, I'm I'm authorizing that you send $100 from this wallet to that wallet, and then the funds are moved. And so that whole settlement infrastructure is has changed dramatically. And, you know, the the really impressive thing about stable coins and the the regulatory environment has changed to enable this to happen as well. So people understand that this is a very trustworthy way of actually sending real value between two individuals and avoiding all of that, you know, I call it like middleware that was there before that took their pound of flesh to enable that transaction to happen.

Dante Reminick 8:20

I love that mental model. I I talk to people all day about stable coins, but I've never heard anyone explain it as the fact that the traditional system decouples the information flow and the money flow, but stable coins bring those two within one piece of technology. I love that. And talk to me a little bit about the advantage of actually having the communication and the money movement happen on one piece of technology rather than the traditional system where you have an acquiring bank talking to a merchant bank and you know all routed through Visa and everything like that. What are what are like the tangible advantages that you see in cybrid from you know building out a system that is stable coin-based versus what you did in the in the traditional financial space?

Avinash Chidambaram 9:03

Yeah, so

Enterprise And Remittance Use Cases

Avinash Chidambaram 9:04

one important element of it is uh is everything runs on a good funds model, uh, meaning that you know I actually have to have the money in my wallet. And then when I transfer it over, I'm actually transferring uh $1,000 from one wallet to another wallet. There's there's no um you know so one of the so one of the the the obvious things that that helps with is like if you're a if you're an enterprise, like you know, we we have a bunch of enterprise customers that buy um manufactured goods from overseas, buy manufactured goods from China. Um, you know, CFOs tell us that in the typical world, you go and you'd send a wire and you'd hope, you know, in five to six days it was received by the recipient. But there's a ton of anxiety that comes up because your ERP is telling you you're running out of inventory, the CFO starts calling the supplier saying, hey, I sent the money. And sometimes Because you have these intermediaries who take their um cut of the transaction for doing their own processing, the recipient doesn't necessarily get the exact amount that they're supposed to get. Now, take that and convert that to how that might work with a stablecoin payment. Now the CFO says, okay, I'm running out of inventory, my ERP is telling me I'm running out of inventory. It might be my agent actually that tells me, hey, you're running out of inventory, you need to make this purchase. I authorize it on my so I sign the transaction, the money's gone, but now I can see that my supplier's wallet received my funds. I know that they received it. So now when you're calling your supplier and saying, hey, I've made that payment, you need to ship me the goods, you remove those five, six days of anxiety on managing your business so that you know that, okay, I've actually already paid the supplier, now I can call them and harass them and say, send me that uh tracking number. I need to make sure I I fill up my inventory. And we've we see this all the time with larger e-commerce businesses. Like the longer it takes for you to pay and the longer it takes for you to ship, the more you're compressing your margins and your revenues. You can just imagine the kind of environments where that that can really work, right? Like we have marketplaces that do groceries. This is something new that we learned. Like it turns out, you know, there's like this organization in New York that buys most of like the papayas and mangoes and stuff from around the world, and local grocers go and buy it from that marketplace. They're not all calling the farmer in in Peru and saying, hey, I'm like to buy some mangoes. So if we think about it from their context, like we want to make sure that we make that payment instantly, and then you ship these perishable goods as soon as you can. Because the longer those perishable goods are waiting to be shipped, the worse your your like the more losses you might have because they might get spoiled or whatnot. And so those kinds of use cases are very directly relevant to the bottom line of those enterprises. And so we just find that um because you're now being able to you're able to demonstrate to the to the the payer that I've made the payment, I can guarantee that it's been received by the your some supplier who needs to ship me those goods, you really compress those timelines and you make it make two things possible. One is I hold on as a business to my cash in my treasury for as long as I need. And I make the payment only at the last minute for the goods that I need delivered to me. And so that's like a you know, one of those those use cases. The other thing is um, if you think about it from a remittance side, you know, people want to send money home to their families. Um it kind of goes back to my case with my brother. It's like you want to, you know, if you if you're trying to you want to know that your your family got got the money that they that you're sending to them and that they received the exact amount that they you had been quoted for. And so the idea that and it's actually really interesting depending on the corridor that you're going after, you know, like um there's a lot of people who send remittances to South America. And it used to be that you would, as a as a remitter, you'd worry about what's the FX rate, how much is my cousin or grandma or my family going to receive? And so you're always doing that conversion in your head, like how many pesos are they gonna get? But that whole thing starts to change because now you're like, well, actually on every one of my paychecks I want to send $100 home. And so you just send 100 USB C on stable coins home, and now the recipient can decide when do I want to convert it to pesos and when do I want to use it. But you can consistently not so the sender is no longer worried about like, oh, what's this FX rate gonna be? How do I maximize it? Now the recipient can decide when they want to actually convert it and maximize it. And that's actually also true a little bit on the business side, right? Like $50 trillion of cross-border volume is in US dollars. Um and we find that businesses want to receive US dollars, and now they can do that with stable coins, and then if they need to pay their local employees, they can convert it when they want. I kind of got on a lot of stuff there. Jump in at it.

Dante Reminick 13:54

I

Compliance KYB And Monitoring

Dante Reminick 13:55

I love it. I I want to pause because I think that we're getting into some dangerous territory, and that dangerous territory is we're in danger of gross oversimplification. Because I think a lot of people like when they hear that explanation, they're like, oh, I take my wallet with stable coins and I send you stable coins and it's done. Right. And that's how a lot of people describe the process of stable coins, but you've built cyberrid in in a much more impressive way than that. Like, that's not how cybrid moves money. You guys have licenses, you guys have banking relationships to actually complete the full flow of funds. So I wanna I wanna dive a little bit deeper and and really try to stay away from that gross oversimplification of stablecoins is just moving money from A to B, because you guys do so much more than that. You've spent a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of money on doing more than that so that you can move money from point A to point B in the full flow of funds, legally, quickly, and for as cheap as possible. So tell us a little bit about what cyber does other than just taking USDC and sending it from here to there.

Avinash Chidambaram 15:00

Yeah, I I mean I think and that's a great point. I think it's important to highlight that um you still have to do the due diligence. You still have to make sure that when you onboard a business, you're doing all the KYB and making sure it's in the real business, that when they're sending money to a supplier, you're doing the transaction monitoring on that on that uh that transaction, you're making sure that the supplier is a real supplier, and um this is a legitimate transaction because we ask the the supplier to upload an invoice or a PO so we can our purchaser that we can say, like Dad, this is actually a good transaction. Because you're right. We're a regulated entity. Um we report to regulators in Canada and the U.S. We have banking relationships. We we the all of that are all those rules and regulations apply regardless of if you're using stable coins or if you're using traditional fiat rails to make a payment. And the what we realized was that just providing the stablecoin rails and the on-ramp and off-ramp is not enough because if you're a fintech that's trying to build um you know a vertical product or you're trying to build a new way of uh delivering financial services, bill pay applications or remittance applications, you need to make sure you're doing it in a very compliant way. And so what we've done is we have the technology, but on top of that, we have all of the compliance services, all the transaction monitoring services, all the wallet monitoring services. To make sure that if you're sending money to someone, we know that that's a good actor that you've sent the money to. The wallet is a good wallet. It hasn't been used in with mixers or with with organizations that as an as an as a uh um not just an industry, but as a community and as as uh residents, we don't actually want to enable bad guys to be sending money to each other and doing things affairs. So when we say we're focusing on the stablecoin payment, we add on top of that all of the compliance checks for both the sender and the recipient. And we work with partner banks in local jurisdictions who also need that information so that they can report and say, hey, my you know, my my bank customer received money as a remittance from overseas, and I've done the last mile delivery because I've received it and it I'm gonna they want it in rupees, for example. And so we've built all those layers into our infrastructure, and we've tried to make it so that it's a very simple uh process. It's not a simple set of steps, but it's a simple process. Like, yes, we have kind of made it easy to understand, but it really comes down to you have to verify who the sender is, verify who the recipient is. You have to report all these things. These are rules and like and legislation and regulations that you have to do. And then once you've done that, you can make that payment happen incredibly quickly. And then that using stable coins allows us to do it quickly, which means you can do things like make sure that the effects that you've quoted is in fact the effects that you get.

Dante Reminick 17:55

You know,

How Fast Is Fast

Dante Reminick 17:56

can I interrupt you here for a second? Sorry, you use the word already. Please do.

Avinash Chidambaram 18:00

I can go on and on.

Dante Reminick 18:01

Use the word quickly and incredibly quickly. Can you quantify what that actually means for most of your flows and then compare it to what the traditional time would be?

Avinash Chidambaram 18:12

Yeah. So if you look at a let's think a B2B payment, um when when a customer says, okay, I want to I they're they let's say they put $100,000 into our platform. And what I mean by that is we've opened a bank account for that business with our bank partner, and they're holding $100,000 of US dollars in it, and say, I want to send money from here to uh Mexico. What we do is we take the I want to spend $1,000 on goods from Mexico. So we take the $1,000, we send it over RTP to our partner circle and mint $1,000 USDC. That typically takes you know 45 seconds to a minute settled on chain. So you're waiting for the the transaction to settle on Solana. And then we send that from the wallet for that business to the wallet for the supplier who we've pre-vetted. We know that it's a real wallet. We've onboarded that supplier. That can take you know seconds for it to complete on the Solana network. And then we have received a quote before we even did that transaction to say, here's how many Mexican pesos you will get if the recipient wants to receive it in Mexican pesos. And we send a signal to our partner in Mexico to say, please convert this stable coin into pesos at the price that you quoted us in the window that you've given us. So typically these windows will fluctuate hourly, for example. So if we have some partners who say on an hourly basis, we use the Reuters rate to change what the FX might be. But because we've now converted the US dollars to USDC in minutes and we've sent it to them in seconds, you're doing you were able to say, I can guarantee that the FX I quoted you is in fact the FX that you're going to get. And then our partner says, okay, I'm going to convert that USDC to Mexican pesos and deliver it to my customer over the local Rails. Another example is PICS, where you convert it to Real in Brazil, and they can deliver it on nearly instantly because they have local real-time rails to deliver it to the end customer. So we've taken a transaction, and let's do that in the traditional way. The traditional way I go to my bank, I fill out a form, or I might even have the ability to do that online, a wire form, and I fill out all the details of who the who I am, who the supplier is, who the beneficiary is, uh, what the bank account information is. That form gets sent usually to a wire authorization team within the bank who'll look at it on a periodic basis and they'll say, okay, every few hours I might authorize this transaction. Then they deduct the thousand dollars from your bank account and they send it to what's called an intermediary bank, because not all the banks are connected to each other. There's about 10 very large banks like JP Morgan, Citibank, HSBC, Wells Fargo, that will take that information and say, I have a connection to another banking partner in Brazil, so another intermediary bank. So I will review this wire information, I'll take a fee for that, and then send it to the next intermediary bank in Brazil that has also a connection to SWIFT. So they send that information over to SWIFT. And then the recipient bank of Brazil will look at that same wire information. So they're all looking at the same form and saying, okay, I'm going to do my own analysis of this to see what the risks are, and then send it to the final recipient bank to say, please do a PIX transaction to the end user. That whole flow can take days. And there's lots of reasons on why banks will hold on to the funds in each of those intermediaries and steps along the way. Um there's compliance reasons, there might be other opportunities for those banks to monetize those those flows. Just holding on to cash gives banks the ability to make some money. But that's the difference between doing that same transaction from the you know, your bank account in the US to Mexico over stablecoins. We've done that in minutes, versus doing that over your traditional Rails, which could take days. With lots of intermediaries and lots of fees that get accumulated along the way. So one of the complaints that we used to hear with enterprises, they say, Man, I I sent $20,000 to my supplier, and he's like telling me he received $19,000. And now I have to send him another thousand dollars. That's super annoying. Right? Because you don't actually even know how much you're gonna lose along the way. And then sometimes you'll see like on the wire forms you can say, will I pay the intermediary fee? Like, should I pay an extra hundred dollars to send this transaction fast? Or shall I shall I decide that the supplier pays the hundred dollars and they'll just take it out of the cash that's flowing through their system? So basically meaning that you have to prepay for the intermediary to get their share of funds. So all that stuff gets avoided. Um because you know, the the partners our partners in in Brazil or Mexico accept stable coins. And um they have this large appetite from local businesses that want to access US dollars because that's just how the world tends to work, right? Um for cross-border payments. Did I did I get through with all that?

Dante Reminick 23:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to talk about that appetite that you just mentioned, right? Like we've established that stable coins for the flows that you're working with are cheaper, they're faster. We've seen cyber's volume grow tremendously, and we can touch on that in a second. Why do you think this is? Do you think that like you see most growth in particular regions and particular corridors where these types of flows are advantageous? Do you see it with particular use cases? Where do we see the advantages of stable coins being most impactful for your clients?

Avinash Chidambaram 23:48

Yeah. So I'll give you the example of uh we had a um an automobile manufacturer in Bolivia, and they sourced their cars from the US and they sell them in Bolivia. Um and so they said to us that when we go to the bank, you know, we have to pay for these cars in US dollars to the manufacturer. They ship the cars to us. And when we go to the bank and say, hey, we need to get $100,000 of from our Bolivar's into US dollars, the bank will charge them about 6% um for that. And so Yeah. And you have to have a relationship because there's a lot of capital controls that um governments have implemented and controls around their banks, because they are also trying to manage uh you know how people are spending their local currency and managing the effects of their local currency relative to the US dollar. And then that same organization said to us, like, if we if you can help us pay with stable coins, we're able to go to a local exchange and get that at one to two percent. And so there's this appetite locally for businesses that still have to buy stuff from their their partners overseas um for those US dollars. And like it's hard to turn off stable coins. You know, you have to turn off the internet, right? And so what you can do as as uh as a government is to start to legislate it. And so that's what we're starting to see in terms of like regulations where you know there's there's there's this this understanding now that stable coins are payment tokens. They're not they're not securities. And that was the clarification that that happened in the U.S. with the Genius Act. And so now there's this appetite for play for organizations that had trouble accessing US dollars through their traditional bank networks. So the way that you would normally get US dollars into Bolivia is like someone actually has to send it to Bolivia so that those banks have it in order to turn around and offer it as an effect rate to local businesses that are trying to access it to pay their uh suppliers in US dollars. But by the way, so there's this huge appetite for it, and now you can access it because stable coins just travel over the internet. You don't have to go through a bank to access it. And those enterprises in Bolivia that are buying cars from the manufacturers say, actually, now that there's good legislation in the U.S., we understand that these tokens are really safe, they're backed by really the highest quality of cash, which is treasury. Treasury is the highest quality of US cash. Then they feel very comfortable that I will use a you know a genius compliance stablecoin token to make that payment and I can access it from my exchange. And so you start to see that around the world. So, you know, remittance to India, for example, there's a premium on the FX rate for a stablecoin to a rupee versus a US dollar to a rupee. And um so you know, when banks control the money supply in US dollars, whether it's retail customers or it's enterprises who actually want to have access to those dollars, they have another source of being able to secure those from by leveraging stable coins. So you have a ton of people who are really interested in stable in US dollar-denominated stable coins in the local jurisdiction. So they pay, for example, in rupees to get stable coins so that they can pay their bills. And so going the opposite direction, if you doubt doing your ribbons, those same partners say, hey, I have a lot of rupees, and all of my local um customers really want stable coins, and we're saying, hey, we're gonna help you, we're gonna help our U.S. customers make payments or remittances to India with stable coins as a really good match, right? You have local Indians who really want stable coins. We have remittance customers who want to send um using stable coins. And so that match is how we've start to see really tremendous growth. And really, like in the last years, we've started to see customers go from millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions because their suppliers are saying, it's like I received US dollars, but I didn't have to go through all the trouble of doing it through my local banking network, and I trust it. So now just pay me in US dollars. And so we're seeing more and more of that, and which is why our you know our volumes are starting to really sort of ramp up with these enterprise use cases.

Why Teams Choose Cybrid

Dante Reminick 28:27

Yeah, I I think that the the market, and when I say the market, I mean you know, your average business owner that engages in cross-border commerce is slowly starting to realize that the status quo of banks and financial institutions fleecing them on every single transaction is is coming to an end, right? Like these margins are rapidly compressing, which is which is a good thing. I also see on the flip side, there's been a tremendous amount of supply increases. And there's a lot of people that are starting companies to do cross-border payments in stable coins. Uh, some are doing it, you know, across one API and handling it end-to-end, like you guys are. There's a lot of people that are injecting themselves in specific flows. I imagine that in a lot of cases, people are coming to you and saying, oh, I'm talking to this other company that's using stable coins, I'm talking to this other company that's using stable coins. How do you describe cyber's edge in this case? Why do people come and choose cyber? Why do we see your transaction volume increasing so much?

Avinash Chidambaram 29:25

I think there's a there's a couple of things. Like uh, you're absolutely right because now you can build these fintech experiences just using software. And um, you know, interestingly, we have a bunch of those companies using us as the infrastructure layer and building on top of us because we take care of that compliance bit. You know, we're we have regulated entities in multiple jurisdictions that'll do all the regulatory reporting. They we do the uh we do the the risk analysis, we take care of the um transaction monitoring, the fraud monitoring, you know, it's a lot of people. Right. So so that that's a little bit and that comes a little bit with experience, right? And so if so what where we are winning is we're not saying that, hey, we're just doing this platform that can move the money A to B. And like any issues here, that's not new. Um what we're saying to our partners is we've we've done the heavy lifting, the grunt work of making sure we've taken all of the compliance and transaction monitoring and fraud mitigation and embedded that into our our infrastructure so you can feel very safe on sending the money from A to B. The other thing that differentiates us is that we're really, really, really focused and double down on making sure that when we give you an FX rate, we guarantee that FX rate. And then the other guarantee that we have is that we will deliver those funds to you and we try and deliver it under five minutes. That's our goal. And you don't necessarily get that in every country because you still have more archaic banking infrastructure in some countries. Like you might be able to get the stable coin there, but now you know it's six, it's five p.m. in the U.S. and it's like 2 a.m. in the country that you're sending it to. Maybe it's in to Hong Kong or Singapore. So you still might be waiting until the banks show up in the morning to complete the transaction. So the two things that we really focus on is we've added that whole compliance and um uh transaction monitoring and fraud mitigation layer on top of all of those transactions for us. We do all of the analysis of both the sender and the supplier, we do all the regulatory reportings, we take care of all of that infrastructure for our customers, and then we really focus on we will deliver those funds with the FX rate that we've we've quoted to you so that you don't have these weird mishaps that are happening with our customers when they receive it, and it's not exactly what they had hoped for. And in some countries that's it's becomes really quite important, right? Because the FX fluctuates quite a bit. Um, and so you know, we use Oracle to sort of say, what is the FX that we think we can really guarantee? And then we'll guarantee it, and we'll make sure that you deliver it for. And so that's like, you know, doing the painstaking work of making sure you do that and delivering that kind of value is what we're finding is like really helping us with um with our client-based.

Talking Stablecoins Without Jargon

Dante Reminick 32:13

Interesting. So we've we've gone really deep into the weeds of stablecoin payments and the full flow of funds and everything like that. When you and I spoke before, we talked about how most of your customers, they're not stablecoin native people right now, right? They're just saying, hey, I need to move money from this country to this country. Can you help me do it better, faster, cheaper? When you're talking to those folks, right? The people who run traditional businesses, who have built their financial stack on traditional banks, what does that conversation look like, right? Do people care about what stablecoin on what chain happens? Right, how how how do those conversations normally go?

Avinash Chidambaram 32:53

Yeah, we break it out into, you know, our our our ICP initially was really focused on other Web3 savvy fintechs that we're trying to build and build new products on on uh stablecoin platforms like us. And what we're starting to see, I think in the last year, has been that virtually everyone that does payments has heard about stable coins and they're trying to figure out their strategy in their stablecoins. I would actually go as far as to say virtually every bank has someone that they've hired who is now thinking about stablecoin strategy for the banks. And you see these announcements all the time. And so where we are with that is when we go and we we present to customers what we're able to do, we're able to focus on the value to the business. So we're no longer going in there and saying, hey, look at how amazing this stuff is, and it's all it's stable coins that runs on Seoul or Polygon or ETH or whatever. Because honestly, that's actually not the value to the business. The value to the business was can you tell me that the money has been delivered? Can you make it go really fast? Can you guarantee me the FX? And so we've really seen this adoption because now a CFO or a risk person in an enterprise can say, Oh, this is these guys are using you know Circle. It's a genius compliant stable coin or even Pi USD or whatever, you know, where there's a few that we support. And so we're comfortable with the risks associated with that. We understand that the government has created the rules to prevent you know stuff from going bad. Um and so now the the the the conversation has shifted to how can I take advantage of this? You don't like it's not like you know when you tap your card on uh on a when you're buying McDonald's, it's not like we're sitting there going, well, how does this messaging get transported around and how does the money go from A to B? It's like if you're a merchant today, you're like, man, it's like taking me three days before I get my money. And now you're saying I can send the money and you get in five minutes, like that's crazy, right? Um so we we start to see more and more organizations seeing the value of stable coins around speed and transparency, saying, How do I get that in what we're doing? Um so you can imagine a world where, and this is starting to happen with all the agent e-commerce stuff, right? It's like if I'm gonna buy something online, even now, one of the biggest challenges that e-commerce companies have is like people who buy stuff and be like, eh, this is stuff I'm gonna send it back. And so you deal with all the chargeback risk and all that sort of stuff. But now it's like, okay, I'm gonna buy something by scanning uh um my wallet. It's good funds that went to the merchant, they received it right away. They don't have to wait for the payment to settle to send ship. You know, they they can ship it immediately. They already got the money. And then if there is a return, they're like, okay, well, send me the stuff back and then I'll give you your money back. And so it starts to feel more normal. It's like I received the money, so I'm gonna send stuff, and then because you send them a goods back, they'll give you your money back. And all that, all those layers that were in there that were, you know, like you'd have to deal with in terms of like chargebacks and returns, all that starts to go away because you send me real money, like I got it.

Dante Reminick 35:58

You you said it feels more normal, right? I think that's a really funny way of putting it because to your point, like this is the way that money should work. If I worked hard and made money, I should be able to send it to you, and you should be able to receive that money instantly. Like I can send you an email and you can get that email regardless of what email provider you use, regardless of who your internet service provider is, instantly. And the same thing happened with money even though it doesn't today.

Avinash Chidambaram 36:24

Yeah, and it's like actually good money. Like, I it's it's like I gave you cash. I took it out of my wallet and put it in your wallet. You know, when you when you do a Zell transfer and I'm like, I want to transfer you 50 bucks, it's actually, you know, again, a messaging layer that says, this guy is sending money from his bank, I'm sending money from my Citibank account to your BFA account. So a message goes to Citibank and says, Does this guy have 50 bucks? You go, yes. And then a uh a transaction gets recorded in a ledger saying, Okay, Citibank, you owe 50 bucks to Bank of America. So, and a message gets sent to Bank of America. Bank of America says, Well, I have a credit agreement with Citibank, so I'm gonna honor this credit agreement, and I'm gonna let him let you spend the 50 bucks because it looks like you just got it. But actually, nothing moved. There's just there's just agreements between banks that they have to manage, and there's all this infrastructure that they're managing around it. And then at the end of the day, they go and go through the clearinghouse or something like that to say, okay, hey, Bank of America, you owe 50 bucks, or say bank, you owe 50 bucks, bank of my pay, bank of my pay, you might have sent money to someone else, and they all vent it all out, and then money moves, you know, hours later, maybe sometimes the next day is when it actually moves. So now you get to imagine how complex that infrastructure is. So then let's change that to like, you know, we went out for drinks and uh you paid, so I owe you 50 bucks. It's like, okay, man, I'm just gonna send you 50 bucks of stable coins. Nobody's involved, nobody's in the way. He's like, you just got it. That's how it should work.

Dante Reminick 37:54

Yeah. I I think that's the irony of FinTech over the last, you know, we'll call it 20 years, is that most of the history of fintech has just been, you know, putting lipstick on a pig. They're gonna say, hey, I'm gonna use the same old rails, but I'm gonna make it, you know, a better user experience. But now we have this like really, really big paradigm shift in technology where you're not using the old rails anymore. You're not putting lipstick on a pig, you're actually enabling that money to move and to settle faster than it ever could before. Like Zell's a great example. I use Zell, it's fine, right? It's fine because I'm used to the standard system of money being so slow that it's whatever. Yes, it's a better user experience because I because I can go to bank from bank to bank, but it doesn't change the speed or the velocity of how that money moves. But now we're entering a stage where again, you can actually see that paradigm shift and see, okay, now my money can move better, faster, cheaper because it's not using the same archaic rails that are built in cobalt 50 years ago.

Avinash Chidambaram 38:53

Yeah, I mean that's that's really what it comes down to, right? Is like the the technology is really old. And if you think about it, like traditionally in retail banking, most of that revenue comes from things like swiping cards and getting interchange revenue. So if you're a banker, are you gonna invest a whole bunch of money in improving the technology infrastructure here? Or can you just kind of make it good enough for most people's use cases? And so I actually think FinTech has done a phenomenal job of figuring out how to make things look and feel like they're they're giving you a decent experience. You don't see all those like little tags where you send money, it's like it's pending, it's settling, and then you know, like you might not be able to use it, and then okay, now I can use it. It's because behind the scenes they're trying to actually work around the core banking infrastructure. But I think a really important point there is oftentimes fintechs are using their own cash to front some of those transactions. So they have to then build this pile of liquidity to say, man, I really want this guy to be able to use this to this money. I see that someone is trying to send money into the my customer's bank account. So I'm just gonna like loan him a thousand dollars and wait for that to show up. And so now you have to manage this pot of cash to fake out like it's almost instant. Right? So there's a lot of that complexity that's built into these fintech solutions, um, which is starting to go away because now you can just actually lose the money on-chain.

Dante Reminick 40:21

I mean

The Future Of Stablecoin Rails

Dante Reminick 40:22

that's I think we would need another like three hours to really dive into the capital efficiency of building fintechs with stable coins as opposed to your typical Nostro and Vostro account structure. Um but I'm gonna save the sanity of a lot of our listeners and brush over that for a second. Because I think it's worth noting that we're seeing a huge shift in the way that money moves, but there's sort of a micro progression that's happening even among stablecoin adoption. Like, you know, five years ago, maybe three years ago, we saw a lot of these big financial institutions say, okay, we're gonna take step one. We're gonna build a stablecoin strategy, right? We're gonna plan, we're gonna hire Accenture, or we're gonna hire this person, or whoever it might be. We're gonna build out a point. And then step two is like, okay, how do I use a stable coin? I am gonna figure out the most basic MVP level use case of a stablecoin. And now we're seeing that market move from you know, step one to step two. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are and what you know, step three, four, and five might be in the stablecoin journey, how people are gonna be using stable coins in a year or two years or 10 years, and how and what Cybert is doing to sort of prepare for steps three, four, and five in that case.

Avinash Chidambaram 41:33

Yeah, I think um that's uh you know, it's always hard to predict what the future is going to look like.

Dante Reminick 41:41

I know, I'm putting you on the spot here. Very intentionally.

Avinash Chidambaram 41:44

I think the the really interesting thing to me is when you start to see um like a Visa or MasterCard um say, hey, we're going to enable people to start using stable coins on our platform. And you know, Visa's built some infrastructure to say, hey, we can also enable things like intent to commerce on our platform where you're giving an agent a card. It seems weird to me that you give an agent a card as opposed to just giving the agent stable coins. Um and one of the challenges, and the reason that that's starting to happen more and more is this idea of acceptance. Like those you know, Visa spend billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars on marketing and getting people to accept a visa in a bunch of different locations.

Dante Reminick 42:28

In 16 years.

Avinash Chidambaram 42:30

In 60 years, exactly. And um what's happening naturally with um say uh you know cross-border um commerce for buyers or for remittances is you know there's this idea that that we can leverage stable coins to make these things feel faster and is faster and cheaper. And so naturally, those remittance companies that are now adopting it, which include more traditional companies who are starting to adopt it, are just driving more and more volume over those those rails. And so I'm with I so what I believe is going to happen is the core payments infrastructure is going to all run on stable coins. And there's a bunch of different stable coins that are sort of positioning for things, and they might be that in certain verticals, you know, um organizations are more comfortable with a particular type of stable coins because it gives you some additional benefit um or specific networks that give you some additional benefit, and my which I mean blockchain networks. But my real view is that the movement of funds globally is going to run over stablecoin rails, and the settlement of funds globally is going to start running over stablecoin rails and over blockchains. And you start to see that with like traditional organizations like Swift, you know, who are saying, hey, we're going to go and try this thing out. I I just think that that fintechs have this opportunity to not wait for those organizations because they have their own concerns, right? So banks are worried that people will hold funds in wallets. Not in bank accounts, and that could affect things like fractional lending and so on and so forth, and like worry about leakage. That's not a real concern for everyday uh you know CFOs. He just wants to pay faster. So I think that over time we're gonna start to see this shift in more and more people using stable coins, and the acceleration is already happening, right? Every year you you hear about how the volume of stable coins being settled is like bigger than Visa now. Now it's bigger than Visa and MasterCard. You know, we're so there's this massive shift that's happening. I think before you realize it, consumers are just not necessarily gonna know, they're just gonna see that on the back end, everything is just happening faster, it's happening more transparent. And I think that's where you're gonna see most of the leverage in stablecoin payments.

Dante Reminick 44:46

Yeah. I mean, if I were to summarize our entire conversation, I would say that you know, stablecoins help money move the way that it should. Money should be able to move differently. Money should be able to move around borders, you know, for Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

Avinash Chidambaram 44:59

We've had the internet forever. And somehow, and most of the messages go over the internet, but somehow we're not able to actually move real value over it. Now you can move real value over it. Yep. Until now. Now you can move real value over it, and that's how it should be. Yeah, I shouldn't have to fly to Japan to give my brother cash. I can just send him stables. That's how it should be.

Dante Reminick 45:21

It's 2026, and there's still many, many cases where the fastest way to get money from point A to point B is to take a bunch of cash, put it in a suitcase, go to the airport, get on a plane, and fly it overseas. It's ridiculous.

Avinash Chidambaram 45:39

Well, you I'll put it the other way. Like, you know how businesses used to collect cash? It used to be that you would take the cash and you take it to your local branch, and be like, here, deposit in my bank account. People are like, deposit fine. Those same businesses, when they take cash and they go to the bank and say, deposit this, now banks are saying that's gonna cost you 2%. But I have it in cash. Why is it costing me 2% to take my own cash and put it into my bank account? So why would you do that? Like I think that eventually people like there's gonna be guys like my dad, he's an old dude, he's gonna have to like pry the cash out of his cold dead hands, probably. And because he just that's just what he's knowing, that's what he's comfortable with. But I can tell you my kids, like, they don't know what to do with a card. They're like, what is this card? I'm just gonna tap my phone, I'm just gonna use my wallet, and so we're just gonna start seeing this transition, and I just think it's gonna happen faster and faster before you need it. Because the benefits are so obvious.

Dante Reminick 46:28

Have your kids ever seen like a check before? Like when you read a check, never seen a check.

Avinash Chidambaram 46:34

Yeah. No, that that is, I don't think we will even talk about that. They don't even know what to do with cash. No, they're like, buddy, why do I have cash?

Dante Reminick 46:41

It's 2026. We're bending the laws of physics and catching skyscraper-sized rockets with chopsticks. It's about damn time that money works the way that it should.

Avinash Chidambaram 46:53

Um I love the way you put that because it's crazy that it doesn't now. Yeah.

Dante Reminick 46:57

It is. But I mean, again, there are there's companies like Cyberd, there's people like you who are out there trying to change it. Um, and so I think that this this reckoning and this rebirth of money is is gonna come a lot sooner than than people think, right?

Avinash Chidambaram 47:11

But I mean, go ahead. I was gonna say it's kind of like the AI thing, right? Like it's like people have been working on AI for like 20 years. And then, you know, when Chat GPT 3 came out, we're like, holy shit, this thing's amazing. And then it's like boom, there's uh I think every single person I know is using an AI tool at some point. And so I think that's just gonna start happening again with on the stablecoin side.

Closing

Dante Reminick 47:34

I I hope so, man. Um, I want to wrap up here. I very, very much appreciate the time, Avinash. If anyone wants to go and check out Cybrid, that's cybrid.xyz, I highly recommend that you do so. They're some of the best in the business of what they do, and just so that everyone knows, that's c y br I d dot x yz. Um, highly recommend that you check them out. Um, thank you all for listening. And and as always, stay stable.