Remy: Well, the stablecoin industry's market cap hasn't budged much this year but has hovered above $300 billion for most of the year. And here at Money 2020 USA, stablecoins are a hot topic of conversation being explored not as poor global, not just as poor global financial infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Open USD stablecoin rolling out in Samsung wallet integrated. With digital dollars set to connect up to 82 million US devices, while joining me without further ado here in Vegas is Kevin Layinity, who is CEO of Borderless.xyz. Kevin, great to have you here. Thank you so much for getting up early and joining me here.
Kevin Layinity: Thanks for having me, Remy.
Remy: Well, a lot of conversations are already taking place here on the ground at Money 2020 2026. But first and foremost for our viewers out there, give us. A sense of what's happening on the ground and also what this last mile fiat handoff actually is.
Kevin Layinity: Yeah, so I think when we think about innovation and payments, I think there's still two main avenues that are being discussed at Money 2020. 1 is certainly AI and what does the Gentic payments look like, and I think that's an incredibly interesting high growth area. But I think that's a high growth area that's happening a little bit in the future where that's really going to become mainstream. And the second area that's being talked about a lot is stablecoins, tokenized deposits, RWAs, blockchain. How does all that fit in? And that is very much something that's happening right here, right now. Um, when we think about the local fiat capabilities, the way that we think about it quite simply is you can use a stablecoin to move value anywhere you want in the world in near real time, right on the blockchain. But for the vast majority of businesses and consumers. That money doesn't actually mean anything to them, and so they can cash it out into their local currency and their local bank accounts on whatever local rails it is, right? PI in Brazil, Spain in Mexico, SEPA in the EU, mobile money in Africa, etc. etc. Um, so where we spend a lot of our time working with the enterprise payments companies is helping them kind of cross this intersection and using stablecoins for things like reducing pre-funding needs, um, to get balance sheet back. Um, and doing instant cross-border transfers, all those things, but then still being able to Operate with local fiat on local rails and actually make it usable for consumers and businesses alike.
Remy: Yeah, and you brought up a lot of themes that we're paying attention to here as we head into your end and into 2027, and as you mentioned, Agentic AI, that is something that all of us are keeping our eyes on. But as with any new technology, that is something that we're still exploring and awaiting regulatory guidance on. So give us a sense of where you see things going right now.
Kevin Layinity: I think in general in the stablecoin world, the era that we're in right now is the institutional and the beginning of institutional enterprise adoption. So, you know, a lot of our conversations that are happening are happening with companies like Western Union are happening with companies like Pfizer, these. Large giants of remittances and financial technology and things like that, those are the ones that are very critically thinking now, how do they take stablecoins and bring stablecoin related products either visibly in the forefront, which is unusual, or invisibly in the background, which is much more common to their consumers. On, I think the AI front, there's some interesting conversations on like how will agents pay other agents, and if you need 24/7 internet native money or stablecoins, the right place to go there. And there's a lot of work that's been done by like Coinbase on X402 and Stripe with MPP and some of these other standards. So I'm very bullish on the intersection of Agentic payments and stablecoins, and I actually think Borless is gonna be a great infrastructure provider in a lot of those cases, but we're seeing those conversations be theoretical versus the kind of stablecoin PISer of Western Union type conversations being very, very practical, and I think that just gives you an indication of how far away various things are.
Remy: And Kevin, some consumers out there might have some anxiety about connecting wallets, not just from a security perspective, but also from a fee perspective. So what would you say to them, and what are some myths you'd like to dispel?
Kevin Layinity: I think in general, you know, one of the things that we're incredibly fortunate to be in is we're in this position where we have a network of on and off-ramp providers all over the world versus being an on and off-ramp provider ourselves. So we have this cross section of transaction data across the market versus just having a silo kind of of our own. And we published some research on this, um, a couple of days ago, where we looked at now 95 million data points from across our, our network and transactions to look at what is the cost, what is the reliability, what is the speed of using stable points to settle cross-border transfers versus using traditional correspondent banking or SWIFT networks. And what we found is when you compare it to a lot of the, and this is like fully landed cost into bank accounts, this is not just like FX trading or something like that. Um, what we found is in retail remittances, especially into emerging markets, you can see almost like 80% type cost savings in a lot of markets, which is extremely exciting. And even in like larger ticket size B2B payments, where like some of the FX stuff does get a little interesting with stablecoins, you can still see fairly significant, like 10 to 15% cost savings. Um, and that's excluding the cost savings that you get from not having to pre-fund and the 6 to 9% cost of capital that Kind of deploying your balance sheet into all these different accounts takes so when you factor that in, it's even higher savings and quite frankly, the reliability that we're seeing is not quite enterprise payments, um, but in most markets we're seeing 98+% deliverability into all these local bank accounts on local rails. And where the country has an instant payment scheme. So again, think of PI, Spay, instant SEPA, etc. etc. We're seeing like 5 minute settlement speeds, which is crazy that if I'm in Brazil, um, this is probably a terrible example because I'm being in countries at random, but if I'm in Brazil and I'm sending money to Mexico, I don't know why I picked those two. Don't ask me, it's not a huge corridor, um. But I can move that money from picks to spay, and I can do the full end to end bank to bank stuff in under 10 minutes round trip. That doesn't happen in traditional correspondent banking and and SWIFT type networks. It's really cool to be able to take real-time payments networks that are fragmented and connect them with a stablecoin in a blockchain as a real-time connectivity, basically bridge between these local real-time payment systems.
Remy: Yeah, and while I have you here, I do want to ask you about the restructuring play when it comes to the re-own and wallet connect split. So tell us what's happening.
Kevin Layinity: I'm not quite sure, to be honest with you on that one, I have uh good friends, um. Who's the um CEO there who's been an investor in Borderless, um, but I haven't quite like tracked exactly what she's doing, to be honest with you.
Remy: Well, finally, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about CBC DC. So give us your perspective, especially since there are so many different opinions here and people are split on this. So at a conference like Money 2020, we know that people are gonna have different opinions, but what role do you think they should play or shouldn't play?
Kevin Layinity: The blockchain person in me hates everything about CBDCs, right? Cause it's all about decentralization, it's all about bringing kind of control back to the participants of the chain, right, and and to the individuals. Um, but maybe my hot take is that CBDCs are inevitable. Um, when we think about putting currency on the blockchain, I think one of the biggest risks that you have when you're taking a staple point, this is not a USD staple point, right? This can be any currency staple point. Is you take counterparty risk on the issuer of that stablecoin. So if you're transacting in USDT you're taking counterparty risk on Tether. If you're transacting with USDC, you're taking counterparty risk on Circle. If you're using OSD, you're taking counterparty risk on kind of the consortium that's issuing OSD, um, and I guess counterparty risk on Stripe, um. In a lot of in the US I think we're very familiar with that because we're a very privatized market. In other countries, it is crazy to take counterparty risk on a private institution for some sort of a public asset like their currency. And I think especially where you have markets with high levels of capital control, the central banks aren't going to allow some random fintech company to go issue their currency on the blockchain, right? It's going to be the central bank themselves. And as much as like that rubs me the wrong way from a blockchain standpoint, I do think it is phenomenally valuable from a counterparty risk standpoint, because that means that you're now not introducing a new party as kind of an intermediary as the issuer. Right now, I'm taking counterparty risk on the Federal Reserve of of whatever that country is, right? Or the central bank of whatever that country is. And if I'm already transacting in that currency, there's no way to do it without taking counterparty risk with the central bank, right? So it's, it's, um, it's probably the least risky way to put non-US currencies on chain, um, and I think we're gonna end up seeing a lot of that over the next 5 years.
Remy: Well, Kevin, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining me here today and enjoy the rest of Money 2020 here in Vegas.
Kevin Layinity: Thanks, brother. Thank you so much.
