Behind every tap, transfer, and payment there is infrastructure most of us never see. And it is being rebuilt right now for the digital asset era. My next guest is one of the people building it. Phil Sham is Co-Founder and CEO of Aquanow, the institutional digital asset infrastructure and liquidity partner behind major players like Visa and Emirates NBD. Phil, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
When people hear digital finance, they think apps and wallets. But you would say the real transformation is happening somewhere consumers never see. Walk us through what is actually going on.
Finance is being rewired and the plumbing matters more than what consumers see on the front end. Money and assets are moving towards continuous, programmable, interoperable rails. It is all happening underneath, behind the infrastructure layer — custody, brokerage services, settlement, tokenisation and all those different functions. All these functions are less visible on the app, but they make everything built on top of them actually work. It is like the TCP/IP of the internet, or Swift for traditional money movement. That infrastructure is now changing the way finance works.
What separates banks that are moving fast on digital assets from the ones that are stuck?
The main question for all institutions is what use cases are they looking to launch. Some banks want to allow customers to access digital asset products — buying Bitcoin, Ethereum. Others are looking to enable payment use cases using stablecoin infrastructure underneath. The nice thing is that the underlying infrastructure is essentially the same building blocks for different use cases — custody, compliance, all of that is a constant. Most of our partners want to continue to own the user experience. If someone is clicking to buy a stock, they want the same experience to buy Bitcoin. If someone is clicking to send money, it should be the same button using stablecoin rails. The backend can be plugged in by a partner that provides that economy of scale.
You just partnered with Visa across the Middle East and Africa to let banks settle in stablecoins any day of the year. What does that mean practically?
One of the main capabilities there is really to allow issuers and acquirers to be able to settle in approved stablecoins 365 days a year. This is really a glimpse of what we are expecting payment infrastructure to look like in the future — an always-on settlement layer that is fully integrated and makes it seamless for all the different participants to settle in a 24-over-seven manner.
The UAE just registered its first fully regulated dollar stablecoin, USDC Universal Digital. What does regulated actually mean here and how is that different from USDT or USDC?
USDC Universal Digital is currently the only foreign payment token registered under the UAE Central Bank's payment token regulations. It is 1-to-1 backed with dollars in onshore reserves, independently attested every month. It is really one of the first live examples of what regulated tokenisation infrastructure can look like — especially in this region. Fully transparent, bank-ready, not just in pilots but in the market. We are super excited about the project and expecting a lot more settlements in the region to be utilising it.
What is the five to ten year vision for Aquanow?
It is all about building up connectivity to different types of distributors within the financial ecosystem — whether banks, fintech companies, or payment companies. The back end of it is: can we build you the Web3 infrastructure that allows your users to on and off-ramp into this new digital age of finance? To offer different ways to distribute tokenised assets, different ways to settle, and move money across regions. That is what we are working on — building up that connectivity and infrastructure for all these different institutions.
Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
No, thank you for having me.
