Breaking Down Barriers: How Li.Fi is Simplifying Stablecoin Transactions

Stablecoin adoption is rapidly expanding beyond crypto trading and into mainstream consumer payments, but before digital dollars can truly rival traditional credit card networks, the industry must overcome complicated tax compliance as well as the fragmented blockchain infra.

While in the nation's capital, lawmakers are gearing up for a major House Ways and Means Committee hearing to tackle these very roadblocks.

And while Congress debates reporting rules about the builders are tackling the technical friction behind the scenes.

Payments just like tapping a regular debit card.

Well this live here at the Stock Exchange is Philipp Zentner, co-founder and CEO of Li.Fi.

Great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, we continue to hear about stablecoin adoption, but when we are talking about the retail consumer out there, tell us about some of the hurdles and how the launch of your new product is trying to tackle this.

Of course, so stablecoin adoption is driven by many, many reasons, right?

It became a very safe environment now with MICA regulations in Europe, the Genius Act, so sins have to be backed 1 to 1 by liquid assets.

This is really, really good.

There actually is yield, so once money is on ramp, there is yield on chain available by companies like BlackRock.

Institutions are trusting these people.

So all of this paves the way for stablecoin adoption and at the end of the day, stablecoin is just extremely fast and cheap.

And for so many consumer products, this is exactly what drives adoption in the remittance context, for example, but also in cross border payments and all of this.

However, the challenge here is really fragmentation.

We have fragmentation across different chains.

We have fragmentation from different asset standards, different types of stablecoins, and for the consumer, obviously all of this has to be expected away, and this is really where Levi.

We are the leading orchestration layer across all crypto.

We have 1200 applications using us, so the majority of the space in the industry essentially, and that really is what we do.

We t away everything around intermobility, token standards, asset classes, exchange and trading venues, and make all of this available within one API.

Yes, and we're here at the New York Stock Exchange, and whether we're talking about IPOs, companies listing, or other types of transactions taking place, we're all about settlement prices.

So when we're talking about stablecoins or even crypto, the big problem might be about trading prices shifting and the final transaction price.

So tell me about what's happening on your end.

So exactly that.

So tokenization here is what we're talking about.

We're talking about. of stablecoin of currencies and of real world assets, and this process tokenization allows us a continuous settlement.

You know the world is global news are moving very, very fast and markets need to be able to react fast.

So not only do we have continuous settlement, we also have programmability and composability.

So as trading is happening by automated systems already, most of the time and as AI agents also come into play now.

Need a different kind of standards and a different digitized version of these assets of these real world asset representations essentially and that's where tokenization shines.

But again, it's early in the sense that everyone is trying to figure it out.

Back then, the internet was also fragmented and different corporations tried to collaborate together and build their own closed systems collaborating with each other, but it was not open.

At the end of the day the market.

And here again we see BlackRock's, we see Franklin Templeton's Benji, we see we see Mastercard's Mittoken Network, and then Robinhood has Robin Hood Shane and Stripe has Temple Circle has Ark.

So there's a lot of fragmentation today and of course we need someone that paves the way for mass adoption and this historically has been Levi.

All the wallets in the space are using.

And now we are working with all these trading desks coming in that look at this like oh there are so many chains to support, so the amount of procurement processes you have to conduct is intense.

So all these chains, data service providers, different APIs, all of that just comes out of one API with Levi.

We have our intense system with guaranteed execution and a very modular execution as well.

So if you need more compliant rails or you need. a mixed combination that is abstracted away.

And finally, before I let you go, here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, we talked about DMMs that they are the designated market makers on the trading floor, but when we're talking about market makers in your space and the competition, how is that an advantage?

Market makers in our space often also called solvers.

It's like a very fluid term nowadays.

Solvers are called solvers because they not only have inventory, they're not only a market maker, they also make use of on-chain money markets, and this is a complexity which requires much more complex solving of.

If you think of a trade like a riddle, how do I get to the best price possible while increasing my own margin?

Now you can make use of all these entree money markets, and this is really the difference whereby a traditional market maker simply operates on an order book.

Certainly it also has different kinds of liquidity sources to source liquidity from, but in the defy space, decentralized finance space.

This is certainly a bit more complex and fragile, so it takes it takes much more technical know-how to do this.

Well, Philip, we are fast approaching the opening bell here at the New York Stock Exchange, so we will have to leave it there.

But thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing your insights.

Thank you so much.

It was a pleasure.