JD Durkin: Head of payments at the Solana Foundation. Nice to see you today. Thanks for taking some time for us.
Amira Valliani: Thanks for having me. This is a fun time.
JD Durkin: Let me ask you about Samsung. They’re specifically, among many others, to be fair, building stablecoin transfers on Solana directly into the Samsung Wallet. What does that put into people’s hands, from your perspective?
Amira Valliani: This is a really cool announcement. I think for years, people have been talking about stablecoin growth, what it’s going to look like when you actually have mass stablecoin consumer adoption. And the assumption was there would be a killer feature. And of course, there are plenty of killer features. But here we have the killer integration.
So what this means is 82 million people who have Samsung devices in the United States don’t have to do anything. When they open their Samsung Wallet on their phone, they’re going to have instant access to stablecoin on Solana, and they can use that to send it anywhere in the world and take advantage of the same sort of low prices and instant settlement that you get with stablecoin. And so you have mass consumer ability to actually use stablecoin as soon as this is turned on.
JD Durkin: It seems as if stablecoin activity has exploded on Solana, to put it lightly. We all see the headlines. We track it. Give us some context, some better perspective from your point of view. How big has the explosive growth been? And help make this make sense for the average person watching at home, as to why this, at this point of the iteration, is such a big deal.
Amira Valliani: The numbers are really big. So $5 trillion of stablecoin volume on Solana this year alone, and we’re not even all the way through the year. $17 billion of stablecoin issued on Solana. You have more transactions, period, happening on Solana than on every other blockchain combined. I think what’s tough to conceptualize, though, when you think about something like $17 trillion, sorry, $5 trillion in volume, is what does that actually mean?
I think what’s most exciting is to actually look at the companies using stablecoin on Solana. So you have Western Union refactoring their entire business, because they see the benefits of what it looks like to use stablecoin and really be able to eliminate, or mitigate, things like pre-funding pools all over the world. You see, you know, companies across the board figuring out what it looks like to integrate this into cross-border payment flows. The Bank of North Dakota is using stablecoin on Solana with Roughrider coin, because they’re thinking about how to do interbank transfers. And so you see all these major companies that are not just experimenting with stablecoin. They’re really thinking hard about what it means for their business and how it can deliver value for them and their customers.
JD Durkin: Western Union, that’s a legacy name in payments. What does that tell you about not just where the industry is today, but where it will continue to be, when you’ve got names like Western Union increasingly more and more in the space that you specialize in?
Amira Valliani: It’s a big deal. I mean, I’m about to hit my five-year mark at the Solana Foundation, which is bonkers to think about. You know, it used to be that we’d have a name like Western Union, which is an incredible name, or Fiserv, or the Bank of North Dakota, talk about building on Solana, and that would be the big movement over the course of a quarter. And now we’re hearing from these companies every week, every day, coming to us, talking about how they can use stablecoins.
I think what it tells me is that we’re really at an inflection point where the infrastructure is here. So everything you need to actually integrate stablecoin into your business exists. You can build things pretty much out of the box. It’s easier to integrate. It also means that the infrastructure is well tested. So now we have, you know, about six years of Solana mainnet data, where you can actually see the network perform really robustly. People say, hey, this actually makes a lot of sense for our business. We’re not just going to put it in a sandbox and limit it to one small part where we provide some kind of experimentation. We actually see what it means to make this a big part of what we do and really drive down our costs or provide new value.
JD Durkin: I only have about 30 seconds left. If you could talk to me quickly about a token supercycle. We’re hearing a lot more about that. What does that phrase mean to you?
Amira Valliani: I think what’s so interesting about this is you see tokens in the blockchain world, and now you see tokens in the AI world, and it’s tokens all the way down, you know? So if you think about what a token is, it’s a machine-readable format of an asset. And you’re just seeing an enormous growth of tokens across the board. You see tokens in LLMs, but you also see tokens in terms of the growth of real-world assets, stablecoins, all across the board. This growth has started. It’s just going to be massive over the next ten years, and it’s going to be really obvious that anything that’s an asset can be machine-readable as a token.
JD Durkin: I’m really excited to see you here at Money20/20 next year, so we can talk about how all this exciting stuff has continued to grow. Have to leave it there for today. Thank you for sitting down with us, or standing by. I appreciate your time.
Amira Valliani: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
JD Durkin: Amira Valliani, head of payments growth at the Solana Foundation.
