Remy Blaire: Well, crypto prices are fairly muted following the failed Senate cloture vote yesterday, but we did see a selloff in afternoon trade on Tuesday.
Now, the stablecoin industry's market cap has been relatively unchanged this year, holding above $300 billion. The digital dollars moved more money than Visa and Mastercard combined in the U.S. last year, and Wall Street institutions are increasingly launching their own stablecoins, as seen through the Open Standard Partnership.
Meanwhile, agentic commerce could be the next big catalyst in driving the industry forward.
Well, joining me this afternoon to weigh in is Ryne Saxe, Co-Founder and CEO of Eco.
Ryne, great to have you here. So first, let's start out with the nation's capital and the failed CLARITY Act vote. So how does this weigh on the industry as a whole, and what does it mean for digital assets moving forward?
Ryne Saxe: It just slows U.S. market access to the latest innovation, the latest market opportunities out there.
Clearly, we're undergoing a great migration on the back end and seeing some true innovation and market creation onchain. I think U.S. consumers, U.S. retail, U.S. institutions are going to be restricted or slowed down from accessing those markets going forward.
There's more work to do. We will open those markets in the United States. It's a question of when, not if. But stablecoins will continue to grow nonetheless.
Remy Blaire: And of course, the nation's capital is front and center when it comes to the regulatory landscape. So what else is needed on the regulatory front for the industry to move forward? And what are you paying attention to right now and why?
Ryne Saxe: Well, I'm definitely paying attention to the stablecoin yield versus the rewards debate. It still feels unsettled, even though there was a compromise position struck in the draft bill several months ago.
I expect that that debate will be reopened since the bill in its current form did not pass. That directly bears on what we build, how we build it and how we help our own customers at Eco.
And then obviously you've got to look at the RWA markets and sort of onchain stock tokenization trends. Those are highly correlated with stablecoins. People enter and exit those positions most often through stablecoins, whether retail or institutional users.
And that's the other section where I think most of the action will be because those are the new markets. That's where you create new opportunities, and that's where you create new risks. And that's where I expect the next version of this bill will focus going forward.
Remy Blaire: And Ryne, I do want to get your perspective on the key Open Standard announcement with institutions that was announced earlier in the summer, and they are eyeing their own stablecoin.
But what actually happens as financial institutions, as well as banks, launch their own digital dollars?
Ryne Saxe: Well, it creates new fragmentation in the market, which creates a need for interoperability infrastructure. That is sort of the market category that we sit in ourselves.
It just creates new pathways for consumers to access this technology. That's the upshot.
And as I said earlier, it's a matter of when, not if, banks adopt this technology. I think they're the primary conduit through which most consumers will access tokenized deposits, tokenized assets, stablecoin holdings.
And I think they have a lot to gain from this trend.
I just think that there's going to be a lot of standard-setting on both the infrastructure side as well as the asset issuer side to improve access and to improve user experience as we go.
Remy Blaire: So I do want to follow up with a competition question. So how can the industry avoid fragmenting liquidity across dozens of stablecoins? And give us your perspective when it comes to competition.
Ryne Saxe: Right now, it can't.
We are fragmenting stablecoin liquidity in additional ways every single month. And I think that's just indicative of a young market, a hot technology that has a lot of promise, a lot of benefits for issuers, institutions and retail consumers alike.
And so you're seeing a race to adopt. That's a good thing.
Ultimately, you'll see additional consolidation as, I think, incumbents as well as new stakeholders agree on standards and find common interoperability solutions and infrastructure to ensure that your dollar is your dollar wherever it may move.
But right now, I think that the fragmentation is sort of early-market experimentation phase. It will get worse before it gets better, and that's why we're building what we're building. Ultimately, it will get better, though.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. And while I have you here, I do want to throw agentic AI into the equation here. So what does the role of agentic AI actually mean in this space?
Ryne Saxe: Well, stablecoins as a technology, I think, are particularly well suited to agentic AI.
I think this is a real X factor when you think about market growth for the next one to two years. Everything we've seen so far is early-stage experimentation. It's interesting, it's promising, but I expect there will be a few agentic use cases that take off really quickly and also surprise us.
I also expect that they will utilize stablecoins.
Stablecoins are programmable money. We haven't fully realized what that makes possible yet. But when you think about a superintelligent actor transacting at incredibly high velocity, stablecoins are a uniquely well-suited tool to enable that.
And I look forward to 2027 and an inevitable moment where agentic AI takes off in sort of a stablecoin transaction context, what that will mean for the market, the growth it will bring in, the new market creation that we'll see as a result.
Remy Blaire: And finally, Ryne, before I let you go, very quickly tell us how foreign exchange could increasingly move onchain and the actual use case for something like this.
Ryne Saxe: That's happening right now.
There are a lot of foreign exchange corridors that are most effectively served routing through a dollar. And very often the cheapest and fastest dollar is onchain through a stablecoin.
You have companies like OpenFX, et cetera, really entering this market with a lot of success because they route through stablecoins in between the fiat endpoints. And that's kind of the first phase.
Ultimately, as that grows, you'll see more of those foreign exchange pairs find liquidity or create liquidity onchain end to end.
And that's where I think this is really exciting because you're going to improve the cost structure, and you're going to just fundamentally make foreign exchange settlement faster as it migrates onchain.
That's one of the adjacent categories that people should really pay attention to when they're thinking about stablecoin growth.
You should look at the velocity and the transaction volume in these adjacent categories because they're highly correlated with demand for stablecoin liquidity and demand for stablecoin volume.
Remy Blaire: Well, Ryne, we will have to leave it there for today. So thank you so much for joining us, and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
