Remy Blaire: Crypto has been slipping the past few days, but that hasn't slowed DeFi's progress on the institutional front. This week, we saw the New York Stock Exchange launch and seek SEC clearance to tokenize stocks, and October is also set to bring the launch of the DTCC's tokenization service. Meanwhile, the big news for the stablecoin industry this week: Samsung will incorporate digital dollars functionality into Samsung Wallet, which could reach 82 million Galaxy devices. Earlier in the hour, we heard from Bastion's CEO on building the regulatory infrastructure below the surface for Samsung's stablecoin adoption. Joining us here is Borderless.xyz CEO Kevin, who will weigh in on being the payments network connecting Bastion to local regulator partners. Well, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
Kevin, CEO of Borderless.xyz: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Remy Blaire: It's exciting news in the space. So tell us about why this is such a big deal for the stablecoin space.
Kevin, CEO of Borderless.xyz: I think for a long time we've been talking about mass adoption and retail adoption of stablecoin technology and what's it going to take. And I think as an industry we've come a very long way from 10 years ago, where it was, go to Chrome, download an extension, here's these 12 magic words. If you lose them, all your money is forever gone. Clearly, that was never going to work. And the question is, where is the threshold that actually enables mass market adoption? And I think this is by far the biggest development that we've had as an industry, where you now have a manufacturer that has the scale of someone like Samsung that's saying you don't need to understand what private keys are, right? All of that is abstracted away. And you don't even need to download another app. You don't need to go and download a Coinbase app or even, in the fintech world, like a Revolut app or something else. This is natively on your phone. No keys, no apps to download, nothing else. 82 million devices are now enabled for stablecoins. And from a remittance standpoint, these are 82 million devices that are in the US. The US is one of the largest originators of remittances. Think about the money, from a consumer remittance standpoint, of people sending money back to their families that come to the US to work and send money home to Latin America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia. These are the places that are massively kind of underserved by SWIFT and the correspondent banking systems and things like that, where companies like MoneyGram, companies like Western Union have built their businesses on these remittances. Now all of a sudden, you put that right into the device natively that people use and interact with to text and call and scroll Instagram and all those things on a daily basis, and you let them send those remittances into bank accounts in 60 countries through Borderless's network and Bastion's regulated infrastructure. The adoption curve is insane here.
Remy Blaire: Yes, absolutely, because I know that you have been focused on the fact that all of us, most of us, have devices in the form of smartphones, but you highlighted big tech adoption. So I do want to ask you about the tech side when it comes to the OS integration. So how quickly do you expect other companies like Samsung to follow suit?
Kevin, CEO of Borderless.xyz: I hope very quickly, right? I think when we think about who are the big device manufacturers, Samsung is of course one of the global leaders in the space. You also have Apple as another global leader in the space. You have Google with their line of Pixel phones as another leader in the space. And then you have maybe some of the less prevalent ones in the US, maybe like Huawei and some of those that are in other parts of the world. But I think Samsung is interesting because they have such a breadth of product lines. They have ultra-premium flagships that they sell very heavily in the US and Europe and other markets, and they also have very low-cost options that they sell into emerging markets as well. So they sit on both sides of this kind of traditional market and emerging market landscape. And I think that's what makes them really poised to succeed really well on effectively kind of becoming a remittance company in a way, which is a very interesting expansion for them.
Remy Blaire: Yes, and Kevin, while I have you here, we are here in the final quarter of 2026, and there have been so many global events when it comes to the payments as well as DeFi space. And you and I will be heading to Las Vegas for Money20/20, and we are also expecting a lot to come out from the big companies as well as the small companies. So what trends are you paying attention to, and what should we be looking out for when it comes to the outlook?
Kevin, CEO of Borderless.xyz: You know, there's nothing like talking about the future of money in the middle of a casino, so I always look forward to it. It's a weird venue. But when we think about closing the year, I think if I look back on 2026, and kind of did in my mind this one-year post-GENIUS Act look back, did it actually have an impact on the stablecoin industry? We've seen MoneyGram, we've seen Western Union, we've seen all these giant remittance companies come in and say, OK, stablecoins are going to be a core part of our products in the future and a core part of our infrastructure. And that's huge for the remittance space. What Samsung is now doing with Bastion and with Borderless and with Coinbase is really the first time we've seen a non-remittance or a non-payments company. Yes, the wallet is a payments product within Samsung, but Samsung is not a payments company to its core. So stablecoins are now transcending and becoming interesting not just to companies who are payments companies, but to companies where payments is just a part of their business. And I think that's another significant inflection in the adoption curve. And I think what we expect to see, maybe not at Money20/20 but at least next year, is a lot of non-payments companies. Even they are going to start to adopt stablecoins within the payments pieces. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's things from Uber, Airbnb, from companies like this that you don't think of as a payments company, but they have a fairly significant payments arm, all starting to adopt stablecoins, especially when it comes to cross-border.
Remy Blaire: Well, Kevin, I appreciate you joining us live here at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective as well as all of your insights.
Kevin, CEO of Borderless.xyz: Thanks for having me.
Remy Blaire: Thank you so much.
