Things Sebastian Says on Podcasts

…So it's quite substantial. And yields are much higher. So like yields of Argentinian pesos is 25% right now. Brazilian reals is 13, 15. So it's smaller money supply, but larger yields. How much of that gets tokenized? Well, we'll try to today zero, it's 0.002%. We're going to try to make it 1%.

Can you walk me through a bank-to-bank transfer across some of these countries? So like Brazil to Argentina, for example, without using crypto or blockchain. How does a payment today go from a Brazilian bank to an Argentine bank?

So with all of these currencies that you've tokenized, the six currencies, is that a B2B to see product? Is that also a consumer product as well? Who is that really for? And how is that really kind of changing the topology of bank payments across countries?

So we call it a platform. So first thing is having a Mint account. So being able to mint and redeem these stable coins locally. We have two go-to-market strategies. One is the crypto as a service, which is this offering that we already have with many banks and fintechs. So integrating it there is…

The image that is coming together in my mind is like we have this central hub of liquidity with all the different tokenized fiat currencies. You call it wrapped fiat. And that's like the center clearinghouse, if you will, for all of these different trades being made across currencies, all the forex…

…five, 10 minutes. You do that. Let's say you're a Brazilian. At the end of that five, 10 minutes of onboarding, you finally see a PIX ID. You send a thousand Rails and then you end up buying it or USDC or UZT. And you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money. Yeah.

…really frequently have not solved. If I want to fund a non-custodial wallet, the KYC process is completely borked. Like one in 10 chance that I get it correct. And then if I do get it correct, to your point, I'm paying an astronomical amount of fees just to have that money served to me immediately.

trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative.

So they should put USDC or UCT as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency. But to be able to borrow local currency from a DeFi protocol, we need the representation of the local currency on chain. So that's why we also need these local stablecoins on chain so that we can flip this and…

Your checking account isn't public. So why should your crypto be? As AI gets more powerful, your privacy gets weaker. Connecting your identity to your financial history on-chain or off is the easiest it's ever been and will only get easier from here. Every data breach adds another piece to the…

…all these countries. And that is what allows us. I feel like we have been working a decade into building all this plumbing to be able to offer, like to tokenize all these stablecoins, which I think is a key piece of infrastructure for the next phase of crypto. And there's not being a simple right.

…So you just said that you've been through all of these companies and you have all of the licenses and the regulatory requirements. What does that get you? What purchase does that get you in Latin America: in these days? Why does having all of these licenses important? What does that enable for you?

I think that's a universal experience for crypto people, especially in self-custodial wallets. There's a problem that we still really frequently have not solved. If I want to fund a non-custodial wallet, the KYC process is completely borked. Like one in 10 chance that I get it correct. And then if…

Yeah, so you pay FX and spreads. You want to go back, you pay again. So you now end up with 900. So how do we fix that? And we started to think, well, we need to fix this. And how do we fix this? And we saw, well, first we need to make the onboarding one-to-one. So the user has to pay zero fees on…

trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative.