The Stable Pulse
Brought to you by Stablecon, The Stable Pulse is where the architects of programmable money, the regulators writing tomorrow’s rulebook, and the institutions bridging TradFi and DeFi converge.
Our expert hosts with deep payments and policy experience, go beyond the surface, bringing the people and ideas driving the tectonic shifts in money and payments.
Bam Azizi, CEO and Founder, Mesh, hosts CEO Beat.
Dante Reminick, hosts the What's Next Beat, about the latest news in the ecosystem.
Justin Friedman, Head of Policy at Stablecon, hosts Policy Beat.
Join them to keep your finger on the pulse of all things stablecoin.
The Stable Pulse
The Deposit Problem Holding Back Crypto Adoption
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Getting someone excited about your product is easy. Getting their money into it is where many crypto, stablecoin, and fintech apps fall short. In this episode, host Dante Reminick sits down with Griffin Dunaif, CEO and Co-Founder of Halliday, to unpack the challenges behind deposits, onboarding, and mainstream adoption.
They explore unified deposits and payouts, the “last mile” of money movement, and why better funding flows can dramatically improve conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value. Griffin also breaks down custodial vs. non-custodial architecture, global scaling under frameworks like MiCA, and how the same infrastructure can power everything from payments and subscriptions to tokenized real-world assets.
If you’re building a trading platform, neobank, payments product, or on-chain app, this episode offers a practical look at what it takes to make moving money actually work.
Subscribe to Stable Pulse for more conversations on the future of stablecoins, payments infrastructure, and what’s next in fintech.
Connect with the Host and Guest:
Dante Reminik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dante-reminick / https://x.com/DanteReminick
Griffin Dunaif: https://www.linkedin.com/in/griffindunaif/
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.
Intro
Griffin DunaifPassage of the stable coin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act.
Dante ReminickBecause analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things. Welcome back to Stable Pulse, everyone. We have a guest on the show today that is very near and dear to my heart. Worked with Griffin for quite some time now, and it was only destiny to have him on the show. So Griffin, welcome. Very, very excited to have you. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Halliday Origin And Momentum
Dante ReminickSo, Griffin, as you know, from being an avid listener, I always like to kick the episodes off with a section that we call Braggadocious. You know the spiel. Please, please, please introduce yourself, introduce Halliday, brag as much as you possibly can.
Speaker 1Excellent. So I'll I'll start with myself and then dive into the company. Um, I'm Griffin. I founded Halliday uh back in 2022, April 2022. Uh prior to that, I studied uh computer science at Stanford. So I actually worked at the hardware software interface doing embedded systems. I also did some applied cryptography. I did some work with Dan Bonnet on applying zero knowledge proofs for pooled anonymity protocols on Ethereum. Uh and then I started Halliday, and we have a singular mandate to supercharge conversion rates at the point of deposit and also withdrawals. Um, and we've been growing very quickly over the last you know, 18 months. We've raised 26 million from A16Z. Um, we're growing revenues by 47.2% month over month. We're onboarding new customers around 20% month over month, and also accelerating our deposit count by over 40% uh month over month. So it's been it's been a wild ride. You know, we got to sort of tame the bull here as we scale. Um, but it's it's actually never been in a more exciting time to be in the blockchain and slash digital asset industry.
Dante ReminickHell yeah, Griffin. We've had a lot of people come on the show, and I tell everyone to brag, and they just give me a generic uh a generic intro. This was absolutely the best braggadocious section we've had. So I appreciate that introduction.
What A Unified Deposit Is
Dante ReminickI want to dive into deposits. You said that Halliday is a universal deposit and payout company. Talk to me a little bit more about deposits, sort of deposits as a as a category. What does deposits mean?
Speaker 1Why does it matter? Totally, totally. And I think a good way to derive deposits is to look at the problem that necessitates they exist in the first place. So the primary motivation behind this category of unified deposits and withdrawals is really a fragmentation problem. And the fragmentation problem manifests as a user experience problem. And I think a lot of people who've tested a digital asset app or traded crypto, you're probably familiar with the extremely poor experience of buying your first asset. Um and so what unified deposits is, it's an attempt to take all of this complexity that exists globally, and it's multi-layered. So it's there's different countries in the world that have different laws and fiat rails and banking rails and card rules, blockchains and crypto assets. It's an attempt to take that all of that fragmentation and hide it behind a single layer, a single user experience. And that's why we call it a unified deposit experience. Um and it's really the first time that it's been possible to consolidate all these different rails into a cohesive uh UX.
Dante ReminickI'm going to try to repeat what you just said, and you tell me if I'm on the right track here. So the problem is that people have money in various different places and in various different form factors, right? Users of applications, they might have money in their bank account, they might have USDT on Tron or USDC on Tempo or whatever it might be, which makes it really, really hard to accept and to collect that money in its various different form factors and locations. So what Halliday does is it essentially has a really, really sexy user interface that abstracts all of that fragmentation and allows people to accept deposits from wherever they might come from and whatever form factor. And then I imagine, and you tell me if I'm wrong, that that same sort of principle applies on the other end when it comes to payouts. Is that fair?
Speaker 1That that's exactly correct. I mean, every user they think in actions. And I think prior to this category existing, if you wanted to take an action, which is get my money from where I hold it today into an application I want to use. That's the high-level action. Without a unified deposit solution, that action is a journey. You have to go to five different websites, you have to KYC multiple times. It's extremely frustrating. We take all of these steps and consolidate it into a single click. And that also applies to, well, I've used an application, I have some tokenized stocks, or I have some Bitcoin. How do I get it back into the real world? How do I go to my local bank account? How do I go buy something at the corner store with my earnings? That's a complicated question in reality. And we similarly solve the get the money out problem and collapse it into a single-click experience.
Dante ReminickAnd I've actually seen a lot of the experiences that Halliday powers, whether it be prediction markets or neobanks, I understand what the user interface looks like. Very, very simple, very easy. I encourage people to go check it out. Talk to me about what's underneath that UX. Like, why is this universal deposit problem so hard to solve? And how do you guys go about solving that?
Why The Problem Is So Hard
Speaker 1Totally. And I I I like to say the complexity to solve this problem is primarily motivated by an extreme level of fragmentation, but it's it's what I'd like to call a multi-layered fragmentation. It's fragmentation in cash. There are many banks in the world. There are many different banking laws in the world, right? Banks are usually coupled to a geography. So if you're going to solve this problem in 150 countries, well, you need to get on the road and you need to get busy integrating a lot of different banking rails. And so that's one, it's just contracting work, it's legal work, and it's engineering work. Months and months and months of this that we do for you. And that's notwithstanding all the different blockchains that now exist, all the different wallets, Solana versus USDT on Tron, right? And then all the different KYC requirements and how the vendors surface themselves at the user experience layer and the login systems. So all this means is there's all these different components you have to talk to. And I think the visual I like to give uh without getting super deep into engineering land is like everybody's familiar with a Rubik's Cube, right? For every action you're taking, you have to rotate that Rubik's Cube. And having your product work under every rotation of that cube is very, very challenging and takes millions of dollars of investment and time and engineering talent. And so we offer that as a service, so you don't need to build all this plubbing out of the box.
The Hodgepodge Flow That Loses Users
Dante ReminickWhat does it look like if someone doesn't have Halliday? Like when you walk into a room and you're going to pitch someone, what is normally the solution that people have? And is there really like that big of an improvement when it comes to using Halliday?
Speaker 1Yeah, and so I like to say that the current state pre-a unified deposit product, and this is a whole category, and there are multiple options, and we're one of the uh the options that solves this problem. But I think the alternative is what we call the hodgepodge. And typically it's a list of buttons in an application that says, hey, swap, bridge, go to an exchange, use your credit card, and these all link out to completely different product experiences. So there's no cohesion for the user. They see a different brand, they leave your website, and the cost shows up in the numbers. You know, most applications are losing more than 75% of their users at the deposit step. And if you're a trading application, if you're a neobank, that number of people who get through that onboarding funnel is almost one-to-one with your revenue. So if you're losing 75% of users, that's really a hair on fire problem. And with a unified deposit product, you can lift that conversion rate from 10, 15% to as high as 50%. So over 3x improvement and conversion. That just means more volume, more revenue, customers with lifetime value. It's it's a top-line metric for every crypto platform. So it really makes the difference when you smoothen out those funnels.
Dante ReminickYeah,
LTV, Retention And Money Out
Dante ReminickI think the lifetime value thing that you mentioned is really important because most of the people that are listening to this podcast, they are using stable coins or on-chain tokenized deposits, whatever it might be, but they're building out financially focused applications. And so when we talk about accepting deposits and the correlation to deposits and revenue, it's not just that it's a one-to-one thing. It's that when you accept a deposit, the money that you are bringing into your system is not going to be valuable to you at just one point in time or just once. It's going to be valuable to you for a very, very long time. Whether you continuously make yield off of that, whether you're you're able to recycle lending cycles, whatever it might be. The value of being able to make those deposits as easy as possible is something that I think most people critically, critically, critically undervalue.
Speaker 1Totally. I mean, the the the calculation everybody ought to do is lifetime value of the customer, right? LTV. Number of customers you onboard times LTV. That is absolutely mission critical for any business building a financial service. Now, basically what we're saying is a better deposit experience increases the number of users where you unlock their LTV. And why this is also important too, it's not just the conversion rate, it's if somebody has a bad experience converting, they're never gonna come back. They're gonna tell their friends they had a shitty experience, and so it's gonna harm other users. Like if you can't withdraw from a financial services application, easily. Like this is not social media where I use it and then suddenly I leave and it's all fine. You know, keep my data, I don't care. The thing that's really important here is I'm depositing $5,000. And if my experience taking my money out is bad, not only am I, again, never coming back, so it becomes a retention problem. I'm gonna tell all my friends, my money got stuck in this place, I couldn't take it out to my bank. This was an awful, awful experience. So getting the user experience on money in and money out really good dramatically impacts core sort of user activation, but also user retention, which all ties into what's your LTV and how many people are you are you converting into real value for your company.
Dante ReminickYeah, you know, we we talk about LTV here and we talk about bad experiences being a hindrance to LTV. And I think of all of the applications that I interact with on a daily basis. And like I have been using blockchain applications for probably 10 years now. I am the definition of someone who is blockchain native. And even today, I despise, despise the standard user experience of needing to work with my wallet and deposit assets. It's really, really bad. Now, obviously, people are slowly starting to wake up to this and and move forward, but it's really, really bad. The bar is really low. And I think that you know, the people who are listening to this in general, if they've ever heard of Wallet Connect or use their wallet to deposit any funds, they know what I'm talking about. There's no one in their right mind who goes in there, hits MetaMask, and it's like, okay, this is a really, really awesome deposit experience. My bar for this is can I onboard my mom? And I've I've tried to onboard my mom. I've tried to onboard my brother, my father, one time even my grandmother. Didn't go well. But that's the bar that I have is is my mother going to be able to use this? And the answer for most of these applications is just simply no. Right?
Design And Reliability As The Moat
Dante ReminickCan you tell me a little bit more about how you guys have built Halliday in terms of, hey, you have this really, really fragmented, messy world of all of these different assets, chains, payment systems. How do you organize that? How do you like what is the building philosophy behind taking that chaos and turning it into something, you know, peaceful?
Speaker 1Yeah, that that that's a great question. And the way we do this is it's two layers. One, it's how do you build a design system and a user experience that takes all the intentions of all these different methodologies, right? So a card is the same intention of using a crypto swap, but the way that that's manifested at the user experience layer is very different. Like if you've seen a crypto swap, right? You'll have top and bottom and quotes and price impact and terrible crazy things.
Dante ReminickThat that UX should be abolished. I want to like universal global ban on all crypto swap UX.
Speaker 1Terrible. Exactly. So so there's this existing modality, which is the swap experience, there's the exchange onboarding experience, but the intention is the same. The intention, the action I want to take is deposit, or it's I want to withdraw. And so we spent a lot of time taking all those, what I'll call like engagement surface, a surface through which you want to communicate, hey, I want to get this thing done and putting that all in a really graceful experience. So a lot of our work is actually design and product excellence and putting in the cycles and working with customers day in and day out to make a delightful user experience. And so that's extremely important. Like we are we're graduating from blockchains sell themselves because they're DLT, it's ledgers, it's super cool. We all believe in decentralization, all very, very important. But as you onboard consumers and real businesses, the experience matters. Like, why do people love Apple so much? There are a lot of reasons, but one reason I love Apple is iOS is just a delightful piece of software. It is an excellent operating system. The design of the phone is just amazing. That has to come to crypto. Um, and that's where we're sort of really trying to spearhead that movement to delightful user experiences. Then, one level below, how do you tame that complexity from a sort of technology perspective? This is where we get into, you know, we've built what we call a workflow system or an orchestration system that can connect to all these different components and then combine them into actions, right? So for every action, we're just taking these Lego pieces and putting them together and having it work reliably. So the real challenge there is can you handle many different formats, which we can, but then can you have them all communicate with each other? Can you have that connectivity be 99.999% reliable? Because again, this is not social media. If it goes down for an hour, so what? If your deposit experience goes down, that is potentially millions of dollars stuck God knows where, right? So reliability is extremely important. And so we spend a lot of time on making that cross-venue communication and settlement extremely reliable.
Dante ReminickI love that. That's that's really, really interesting. In our many conversations, you and I have also talked about how one of the key pieces to holiday success is their non-custodial structure. I've talked to various people about custodial versus non-custodial. This is something that you have spent a lot of time thinking about. I've talked to your general counsel about this in a lot of detail. Can you sort of give us an overview of, first of all, what this means, custodial versus non-custodial? Second, the implications to going custodial versus non-custodial. And then third, how Halliday approaches this with its non-custodial architecture.
Custodial Versus Non-Custodial Control
Dante ReminickTotally.
Speaker 1Yeah, and there's a lot to unpack on this.
Dante ReminickI'm sorry, we we can we can spend a lot of time on this. So please, please, please. I think it's absolutely critical.
Speaker 1Um, maybe working back from why does that even enter the conversation in this product category? So it turns out there's a first mile and there's a last mile problem. And I'll use this analogy of when you order something on Amazon and you get something delivered to your door. When it comes from like a big fulfillment center, right? So you know you're outside of a city, massive warehouse, somebody has to get in a truck and deliver it to your front door. That's the last mile. There's a last mile in blockchain land, which is how do I get from a stable coin to the actual digital asset I want, the destination asset I want. So a good example is maybe you want Pi USD or PUSD on a prediction market, or you want a USDC balance on a perp Dex that's not natively supported by your banking rail. That last mile delivery is a short distance, but there are many different roads you can take. So that part of the problem, you actually need to orchestrate on a blockchain. You need to swap assets, you need to move them from one network to another, and then deliver it to the user's account balance. And it turns out there's really only two ways to do this. One, you can take control of those assets on your balance sheet and then deliver it to the user. Or you can create what's called a smart contract, which is what's considered self-custody, and have that system execute it. And the big difference is it comes down to this concept of control.
Dante ReminickAnd hold on, can we pause right here just so that I understand this correctly?
Speaker 1Yes.
Dante ReminickA custodial model is when you, as the business, are, I guess, taking control of those assets. At some point, you have control over where those assets are in one way or another. And then non-custodial is when the assets are based on a smart contract. And the reason that it's called non-custodial is because you, as the company, do not have control over it, but rather the user via the smart contract still has control over it. Is that correct? Precise. Precise.
Speaker 1And this is like the original value proposition of blockchains, right? So self-custody as a concept is the original reason we started building Bitcoin self-sovereign money, Ethereum, right? A programmable blockchain. That was Ethereum's contribution to this sort of science of blockchain. Um, and and we're extending that, which is that last mile delivery. You can do that without taking control. And and why this is very important, companies that take control, that's a licensing, you have to be licensed to do that in the United States and in the EU. That's totally fine. That's a very valid approach. Um you have to have your correct licensing, you have to do KYC. It's very serious. You're you're you have the same trust property as a traditional payment processor or a traditional banking service or money service business when you control user funds. This is very well trodden ground, too. Like if you've ever worked in I'll call it normal fintech, which is fintech outside of crypto, this is the standard. If you control people's funds, which is a position of trust, governments require you to be licensed. Self custody. If you have no control, it exists under a different regime. It's actually still regulated, but the regulation says if you are truly not in control, you are subject to a different set of requirements, which is about the authenticity of that claim and whether your smart contracts are truly self-custodial. If you're self-custodial, you're not subject to the same regime as a custodial or controlled business, which makes sense, right? Because they're two very different architectures. And so the value of that is you can deploy globally. The users keep control of their funds. And it works natively out of the box in 150 plus countries who all operate under that sort of reciprocity with that regime, which was, you know, largely, you know, Vincent has spoken about this in the United States, and MICA is a regime that talks about this. And then of course Clarity in the United States pending it at uh you know when it passes in the Congress. Oh, I think your audio might not be going through.
Dante ReminickMy bad. How do you at Halliday handle all of this? Right? You mentioned before you're just a communicator. You're just sort of the facilitator between disparate payment systems, which I want to touch on later. But like from a custodial versus non-custodial perspective, Mika seems to have its own rules, and Genius seems to have its own rules, and you know, a Singapore entity might operate under its own rules. You guys canonically have various different payment rails all over the world. How do you guys go about navigating the custodial versus non-custodial side of this? And what are the implications for your clients who need to work with you across many different different geographies?
Speaker 1Totally. And
Compliance Strategy With Local Partners
Speaker 1I'll say from a top level, just as a business, we are uncompromising on the concept and the discipline of self-custody. Um, and and there's there's sort of two reasons for that. One, we like to say we have a culture of compliance here. For these technologies to reach Main Street, to be used with billions of dollars of customer funds, you have to build it the right way. And the right way to build a blockchain application is if you are truly self-custody. Then you are you are coherent with the existing laws and regimes that are being in place and the new laws that are being written, all center around control. We are extremely disciplined and committed to having no such control and to truly offering smart contract products. That takes a lot of work. We've spent years doing that. We've invested millions of dollars in Frontier RD. We've actually have over three patents on this exact subject. And what this enables us to do, sort of answer your question, is we can partner with local licensed custodial businesses who need to touch the banking systems. So we don't personally go in and connect to a local banking rail. We find the best in class fiat partner who can do that first leg delivery. Go from, let's say, uh EUR to EURC, and then on a blockchain, we can do the orchestration and delivery to the final destination asset. And that pairing is essential. You pair licensed identity with true self-custody that unlocks the full capability set of the blockchain, which is free digital assets, open access plus connectivity to the incumbent banking system. Um that is our strategy and what we're committed to.
Dante ReminickWhy is this a better system than actually taking custody of users' funds? I mean, to me, custody like seems like the easy way, right? Oh, I can take in user funds, I can hold it, and then I'll just, you know, spit out those funds. It might be more efficient for me to operate that off my balance sheet. It's something that banks have done for quite some time, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Why have you guys decided to make this like a key core principle of Halliday?
Speaker 1Totally. And you know, and I'll and I should be very clear to say like custody when licensed is great. We've been doing that for a hundred years, and we have a fantastic financial services industry uh globally. You know, we have all of the great banks in the US. The the real perspective that I think is is quite the I'll use an analogy too, which is you know, blockchains are like flying for the first time with with financial services. So on-chain products are default global from day one when they fit the criteria of being self-custodial. It's always it's always super important to go to that. It's totally fine to be a custodial licensed product, but then you have to understand what that means. Well, by definition, licensing is very local. So when you're a bank, you're typically a bank in a single country. There's no global bank. You're a bank in the US, and that's the one thing you do, and it's very hard to do that. It takes a lot of skill. If you're a bank in the UK, that is the only thing you're gonna do. If you're a bank in Brazil, they're bank specifically for Brazil. And the reason this is the case is banks and financial regulations are tied to local policy. And so this is almost, I almost say that there's you use this term called payment physics, which I really like. This is another example of the physics of payments and banking and financial regulation. It is by definition in the trust model local. Why? Regulators are going to trust the people who are right next to them to manage the money of the population and your and in your geography. For the first time in human history, we've had a credibly neutral platform for money, which is decentralized ledgers. The first being Bitcoin that really reached mass adoption, and Ethereum. Now world governments are saying if you are actually neutral and it really is just code, that is okay. That is a different category of service. It's an airplane versus a car. So if you're building airplanes, it's really exciting. There's so many things you can do. You can offer global by default financial services, which has never been possible before. We can have trillion-dollar financial services companies for the first time. We see this happening. Neobanks that used to be in the US are now launching global versions of their product on stablecoin rail. So I think that's like immediately just the global nature of the ledger, is extremely exciting. And you can only credibly do that. And you can actually only do that in a way that's compatible with real growth and size through being self-custodial, if that makes sense.
Dante ReminickYeah, 100%. One thing that I try to grapple with when it comes to Halliday is like you guys are laser focused on a very narrow area, which is deposits, right? How do I get money into a specific platform or protocol and then also payouts, which is the opposite flow? But you guys have built a system that's very, very broad and multifaceted. And I again, I don't want to get into engineering land. I don't want to dive into the VM structure or anything like that. But are there other things that you are doing with this sort of communication, facilitation, orchestration system, whatever you want to call it, that goes beyond just deposits? I know earlier in the show you mentioned workflows, and so I want to hear more about that.
Speaker 1Totally.
Workflows Beyond Deposits And Payouts
Speaker 1And there's a lot we can and are starting to do. And I think it goes all back to this concept of there is a collection of actions people want to take. So one way is this called an action, uh, in a more business-oriented way would say business logic. People want to perform business with financial assets. And that takes the form of I want to do X, I want to do Y, and then I want to do Z. The very first action people want to take is well, how do you get started, right? Like we haven't even solved the very basic just move money in, move money out, and do that globally with a good experience. But the second you do that well, well, one, we have the real estate, and then we have the sort of launch pad to then say, what's the next action you want to do? And one example would be well, now that my users are on board, they want to save. They want to earn interest. Well, earning yield now exists in many different places, in many different assets. And we can all collapse that into a single-click experience, or what we just call a workflow. A workflow is just a sequence of things you want to do. It's it's really that simple. It's just, I want to go to the store and I want to go home. That's a workflow on a blockchain. That's the level you can think of in nowadays and with our technology. But then you can go a step further. You can say, well, maybe I want to pay every 30 days. Maybe I want to do a subscription. And in handling all of that complexity and fragmentation globally, just the action. I want to do this, but I want to do it every 30 days. But then you can go even further. Say you're managing a bunch of assets and there's this explosion of RWAs, right? So oil, tokenized oil, tokenized stocks, different issuers, rules, networks. But if I'm a manager, if I'm an asset manager, I don't care about all that fragmentation. I don't care about the details. I care about my strategy. And my strategy is I'm going here, I'm moving left, I'm moving right, and I want to get it done. We sit at that system of action layer, which is give us the strategy and we'll and we'll get the action done. That primitive does not exist. Um, it's actually how we built deposits. We we form a deposit to us, it's just an action, and we pass it off to our action system. And it's the same thing for any other set of things you want to do in programmable commerce. Send it to us and we'll get it done. Um I think that's kind of the vision of the company is to grow into what I like to call it's it's a control tapper. It's almost like your cockpit for every asset operation you want to do, every outcome you want, we get it done for you reliably, um, which is very hard to do without a system like us.
Dante ReminickSo it seems like Halliday Today, you guys focus on being sort of the entrance gate, right? The front gate, and then also the back gate into any given application system, protocol, whatever you would like to call it. But in doing so, you also accidentally, maybe it's not accidental, maybe it's incredibly strategic, but you also built the means of implementing step two, three, four, five and everything else that happens between the first and last step of being part of a system. And I guess you know, we're we're entering two parallel conversations. And so I want to ask you the same question that I asked you before, but now you know, talking about workflows is what do people do today? Why does it suck? And why can Halliday do it better?
Speaker 1Yeah, so especially in in sort of past the gateway, right? So we have the gateway problem, which is how do you get people through the gate and out of the gate? The next step is often, okay, now I'm on the blockchain and I want to access services, financial services. This is where you actually grow that, you know, going back to LTV, this is where most of the LTV is. This is where the real value creation of a blockchain is. So, you know, a lot of people want to trade. Great. Um well, one thing that a lot of applications want to do is they want to access a portfolio of value-added services across many networks and service providers. So the default mechanism to deal with that complexity and fragmentation today is uh does DIY do it yourself? Sorry, you know, you're gonna spend 12 months of you know building, managing keys and gas and all this crazy stuff that we don't need to get into the weeds of. But building your portfolio of services and doing those integrations and maintaining the reliability, you're gonna become a SaaS business. Whether you like it or not, you're a SaaS business now. Um, and that's been the default mechanism. So if you want to offer your, say you're on Solana, but there's good yield on Arc Network or there's good yield on Arbitrum, you have to figure out that plumbing, move it around, keep it reliable, do the accounting, move it back. And so what we can offer, having proven ourselves as a gateway, is we can say, hey, look at all this technology we built behind the gateway. Give us those other intentions. And we'll let you think about just Action Land, where we actually do all of the guaranteed execution, we guarantee finality, all of these things that you don't have to worry about. So it saves you 12 plus months of engineering and a consistent investment, right? So, you know, hyperliquid wasn't around a couple of years ago. When the next hyperliquid comes around, we'll be the ones integrating it for you. So it's not just the complexity today, it's the complexity tomorrow of all the new assets and services being launched. Great one is new RWA pops up. Suddenly everybody wants to trade SpaceX stock, right? On Robinhood Chain. Well, today you got to go do that work. Go buy Robinhood Chain. Not Robinhood, buy the token on Robinhood Chain. Go do the integration. Um and keeping up with that is is really, really quite challenging. And I think has largely held back the industry where to do this yourself, you have to build your own contracts, you know, your own key management. It's it's really, really frustrating.
Dante ReminickYeah.
Routing Liquidity For Any Asset
Dante ReminickI mean, to your point, I think that this problem only gets worse as more change laws launch and more value moves on chain. Um, I mean, you you hear people laugh at even just like in stablecoin land, there's a thousand different stable coins, and oh, how do I manage all of these different stable coins across all of these different chains? It seems like Halliday does a good job at abstracting three main things. The first is the difference between chains, right? Needing to manually bridge from one to the other. Uh, the second is needing to sort of determine I have asset here, I have asset there, or just like the accounting behind everything. And then the third, and to me, what's the most important is actually the liquidity pool side of things. On most trading venues, whether they be you know front-end trading venues that you that you go and do the trades manually, or just the the liquidity pools that abstract, like they operate on liquidity pools. And to me, liquidity pools are one of the hardest things about crypto. And what I mean by that is if a liquidity pool fundamentally is two assets that are put into a given pool and supplied with liquidity. But what that means, if you have RWA number one and a pool of RWA1 and USDC, and you have another pool of RWA2 and USDT, and there's no direct liquidity pool with RWA1 and RWA2, it means that the steps to go between RWA1 and RWA2 is really, really confusing and really, really hard to do. It sounds like Halliday just abstracts all of that in the background and allows you to go from any on-chain asset to any on-chain asset without needing to actually know the nuances between liquidity pools, chains, gas fees, et cetera, et cetera. Is that is that fair?
Speaker 1That's exactly correct. And what's exciting is it's really any asset. So there's stable coins, which are fantastic. It's sort of, you know, that's your electricity. It's it's it's the base need. But to me, the most exciting thing is we're moving, there's this trend to move wholesale capital markets onto blockchains. So equities trading, private credit. This is where blockchain gets really exciting. It's all these assets that used to be extremely hard to get access to, or illiquid, or if you wanted to sell your position, you'd have to do three months of legal work. Now that's becoming tokenized. And the the exchange mechanism is likely going to be stable coins. Um, but you have these edges now of all these different RWAs being being minted. And that sort of creates that problem you're talking about of, oh man, it's kind of complex if I'm moving from my tokenized stock to a private credit position. I have to think about well, where's the liquidity for the stock? Is it on an on-chain venue or is it on an off-chain broker dealer? Um, is the RWA KYC? Is that on-chain or is that off-chain? So we figure out all that interlinking, all that connectivity, even at the identity layer, right? So if you have the KYC with both venues, we'll consolidate that KYC and share it across both of the regulated entities. So our product works across the two boundaries, which is really important. We're on-chain, so we can find if there's liquidity anywhere on a blockchain, we will go find it for you. And we will go get it reliably. That's also very important. People underestimate the challenge of not just finding it. That's great. A lot of people can find it. The second part is can you deliver it across all these venues with 99.99% uptime? Uh, and typically the answer is no. Uh, so that's that's a really, really important piece of this. So as this things become institutional, you can't go down in in traditional capital markets. Like the reliability is an absolute must. Then it's also, well, maybe for a stable coin and even RWAs too, connecting to the issuers is another strategy. So for assets, like sometimes you can you can burn it and then work with them directly through the regulated universe using regulated rails. Um, look, if you're going between currencies, there's always a cost. Um, so it's really about how do you find the best route across both worlds and then collapse all that complexity into a single action. And that's exactly our on-ramps are that actually. We're not trying to source you liquidity on USDC from USD through like a peer-to-peer marketplace. We're working with a regulated party. So we have connections directly to regulated entities. We could do the same exact thing for transfers, for RWA issuers, mint and burn, and collapse it all into a single product experience.
Dante ReminickThat's
Real Customers And Global Use Cases
Dante Reminickreally, really cool. Um I think that we've spent a lot of time in the theory in the theoretical world in this episode, and I want to ground us a little bit. Can we talk about like practical use cases to all of this? Real world examples, um, things like that. And you can you know start with deposits and then go into the workflow stuff. But I want to hear about who's using Halliday right now, what they're using Halliday for. Just take everything that we spoke about over the last you know 30, 40 minutes and give me the real world use cases behind it.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, that and there's a few different categories that we've really driven value for. Um, you know, people launching networks themselves have have seen a lot of value in using our products. So we actually initially went live with you know a layer one blockchain, uh, you know, now called the Data Foundation. Uh, we powered Mega E through their launch. We work with Alio and both uh in stable, the sort of tether-backed layer one Neo Bank slash blockchain using our technology. Um, prediction markets and trading platforms that you know, there's a there's a prediction market I really like actually because they styled the the product so nicely called ExoMarket that that's using us in in production. So we have a really good cohort of customers seeing value and just the the gateway product. How do you how do you get in and how do you get out really, really easily? And I think the next trend that we're seeing beyond just trading is with 24-7 trading of equities. That's a really, really big deal. This has been typically relegated to perpetual exchanges, but now Wall Street's talking about 24-7 spot with regulated broker dealers unlocking major institutional flow. And so there's actually a tremendous value prop of 24-7 trading, which is some big geopolitical thing happens on Friday evening. Well, maybe you want to trade that over the weekend, right? So this is what's been happening, and I think sort of embracing that is quite exciting. Um, I think the second thing that's really important just to consider is look, you know, the United States has high-quality financial services, but a lot of the world does not have access to US financial services. So there's this accessibility movement. And I can tell you from our data only like 7% of our volume is from the United States. Over 40% is from Asia Pacific broadly, and another 40% is actually from Europe. Uh and then you know, we have some. Traffic in MENA in Latin America. But for a lot of people outside of the US, getting access to U.S. equities is actually extremely attractive. You know, the whole AI boom is happening in Silicon Valley. If I'm in a different country in the world who I don't have easy access to a broker account, that's extremely valuable to get economic exposure to those services beyond just stable coins, like purely talking tokenized assets, which I think is a pretty important movement that we're seeing globally. And then just on the stablecoin side, I'll use an example of like services like you know BREX and these neo banks like Slash. There's really great tech forward neobanking products in the US for accounts receivable and accounts payable. You know, if you're managing a trucking fleet or you're doing construction, there is no such equivalent of those services in like 50% of the world's GDP, uh, you know, which is outside some of the major regulated markets, um, like the US and China. Um having ramp or BRECS or SLASH or you name it really hot fintech, but for everywhere else, is actually an extremely exciting opportunity. And so even so those fintechs are all you know building XUS products. Um, but I think there's also an opportunity now for somebody, you know, in a local market to say, hey, I'm gonna build a fintech where you know you don't have like Marquetta in local market, small market outside the US. And we we really take that for granted. Like the fintech ecosystem in the states and some of the more fintech forward markets is it's does not exist everywhere else. And so that's a really important change.
Dante ReminickYeah, you're you're 100% right there. I mean, this is something that, as you know, I I think about a lot and I and I talk about a lot from a fintech perspective. I want to drill down even deeper. Again, two workflows here. I shouldn't say workflows, but two main products that Highlight has is sort of the deposit side that people are using you for and the workflow side. It sounds like on a deposit side, it's like, okay, you can build the most badass application or system possible, but if you can't get money in there, it doesn't matter, right? You need to fundamentally, step one, get money into your system in order for it to operate. And then on the workflow side, it's very much of hey, if you do not want to be siloed into one specific chain or one specific asset, use Halliday for your workflows.
Builder Checklist For Neobanks And Apps
Dante ReminickCan you tell me a little bit more about like how as a builder I should think about whether or not I should use holiday? Like, you know, let's say I'm a I'm a fintech founder right now. What mental model should I be using to think about, okay, do I need holiday or am I good?
Speaker 1Right. So I mean, look, odds are if you're doing anything on a blockchain, you're gonna need what we call a digital asset gateway, which is just how do my users go through the gate to your app and how do they leave your app?
Dante ReminickYeah, can I get money in? Can I get money out?
Speaker 1Can you get money in? Can you get money out? Yes, you should be using how no question. You should be using a unified deposit product at the very least. Just unified deposits as a category. It's sort of a new venture category, it's a new cohort of companies. Um, we think we do it particularly well, but I would say you you have to have a solution like that, or you're losing users. Um, you know, it's it's like having a really bad growth engine as a social media product. Like if you don't have your deposits in order, you're just you're it's just not gonna work, unfortunately.
Dante ReminickAnd I I think the reason that it's a new venture category is it's not like I want to have more money in my app is something revolutionary at all. But because more and more assets have spun up, more and more chains have spun up, and more and more payment networks have spun up, the problem of can I accept deposits has gotten a lot worse. I remember, you know, in the early days of blockchain, people would make a really, really big deal out of what blockchain they were building on. And the primary reason behind that is because they wanted to access the capital that the users had on that specific chain. Hey, I'm gonna go and you know, launch my DeFi application on Solana because there's a lot of people who hold Seoul or who hold USDC on Solana and I want to access those users. Hey, I'm gonna launch my social application on base because I want to access people with USDC on base. And your decision to launch in a specific venue was very, very much tied to the amount of native deposits that you were able to get into that given venue. But it seems like today, because there's so many, you can't really make a good decision there. If you're only locking yourself into accepting deposits on one venue or even a few specific chains, a few specific tokens, you're missing out on an entire world of people who would click the other box, essentially, people who are not falling into that category. And so it seems like when using a universal deposit product like Halliday, what you're able to say is it doesn't really matter where I build, because I'm able to access everyone in the world, again, full circle, regardless of where their money is, regardless of what form factor that money is in.
Speaker 1Totally. And I think the thing that really gets to that point is one, there's look at the numbers, there's 40 million people who have EOAs, broadly, or crypto wallets. There's around 500 plus million people who have centralized exchange accounts. One of our values is that we connect directly to centralized exchanges. Most apps don't think about how am I connecting to the centralized exchange? Because that's where a lot of users onboard is they onboard initially to a centralized exchange. There are a billion people who use fintechs like Revolute and New Bank. Those users should be able to use their Revolut accounts to get onto your platform, right? Because that's their banking stack. And then there's 7 billion people who are banked. So most of the world still, you know, most of the value still sits in bank accounts. Um and unlocking that globally, which is by definition localized, is that final step. And so if you're not hitting each of those funnels and constantly working towards unlocking those funnels with the best possible user experience, you're losing people. If you think you're okay with just a single wallet connector, just look at the numbers I just showed you. You're you're 40 million over 7 billion. That's a tiny yeah.
Dante ReminickDon't use a single wallet connector. Not even for like, hey, I want to be able to accept more than that, but don't use a wallet connector because it's terrible UX and I hate it and it makes me bang my head against the wall every single time. And no one is ever going to build a beautiful, genuinely amazing product using a wallet connector. Just don't do it. For for my own sanity.
Speaker 1Right. You you need wallets, right? But like the the actual gateway, which is how people enter and explore your application, that's a full-time job. And and so like, you know, you can either invest a lot of time trying to build it in the hodgepodge way, or you sort of you use a global solution. And you know, and look, TLDR is the world is a big, fragmented place. And either it's not getting any better. No, no, it's and it's getting worse, right? It's only gonna get worse as there's more value comes on chain, the more the competitive dynamic is we want to be landlords, not tenants, right? So everybody's gonna start launching their own networks, their own services, and that's where these connectivity layers, this connective tissue layer, that's credibly neutral and self-custodial, especially as things get more and more regulated, is extremely, extremely important.
Dante ReminickAll
Self-Serve Setup And Final Takeaways
Dante Reminickright. Griffin, you convinced me. I'm an app builder, I'm a protocol builder. I realize I need to make my deposit experience better. Now what? How how do I how do I take that next step?
Speaker 1You know what? The answer is actually it's it's very simple. We have a self-serve experience. Onboarding is completely done through our dashboard. So you can go to dashboard. I'm sure we'll put everything in in the notes. We have an interactive demo too. We we're not gonna make you book a call to use the product. You can just go immediately. And so we've really focused on the developer experience, which is it's like seven lines of code. It's seven lines of code to uplift your conversion by 20, 30, 40 percent potentially. And to us, that's an extremely clear ROI. Go live in a day, um, go on the dashboard, make your own API key, uh, get access to all the capabilities. Um, it's very easy to work with us.
Dante ReminickI love it. Um, Griffin, I'm gonna end it here. I really, really appreciate you jumping on. Uh, for all of the neobanks that are listening and the trading platforms that are listening and the the banks that are listening. I highly recommend that you go and take a look at Hallid at Halliday's website. They just updated it and they have a really cool globe that you can click on and see coverage and everything like that. Uh, the team is super, super accessible. So please, please, please reach out to them. I appreciate all of you listening. And as always, stay stable.