🎙️ Ep. 56. Jamie Dimon Loves Crypto Now Ft. Haonan Li & Stone Atwine

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This week's episode features Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield in conversation with Haonan Li, CEO & Co-Founder of Codex PBC, returning to the show, and Stone Atwine, CEO & Co-Founder of Eversend, making his podcast debut.

🎙️Listen to the full episode here on your favorite podcast app or 📷 watch on YouTube.

Key Takeaways

Ripple's M&A Strategy: Marketing Meets Substance

Ripple's acquisition spree - highlighted by the purchase of European wallet custody firm Palisade and a $500 million raise at a $40 billion valuation - reveals what Haonan Li described as "some Giga brain stuff from the Ripple team." As Li noted, "The Ripple play has been talk about payments and talk about being the payments chain and hype it all up, have enormous valuation, and then go and buy the substance." This approach, which our previous guest Diogo Monica characterized as "the marketing firm that has used M&A to become a real business," represents a deliberate vertical integration strategy across custody, treasury, issuance and payments infrastructure.

Stone Atwine observed that Ripple is "definitely doing a wonderful job of using M&A to become a leading player...the attempt to build like an end-to-end stack of everything around payments - custody, Treasury, issuance, all under one roof...a one stop shop for corporates and banks to handle digital assets, stablecoins and tokenized assets." The strategic shift from XRP promotion to operational capability building marks what Li called a transformation from "this fantastic business...called sell a token and sell a dream" to "really doing payment ops."

The institutional capital backing - Fortress Investment Group, Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevin Howard, and Marshall Wace - signals broader traditional finance concerns. As Li explained, "There's this anxiety in traditional finance that renting columns will not save them, that even though they have these big buildings and this incumbent position, that they're in the midst of a platform shift that will leave them behind."

The Custody Evolution: From Institutional to Embedded

Cuy highlighted a critical market development around custody architecture: "We're seeing more of the demand and the need for this broader range of custody services that can do everything from be a secure way to hold keys behind many different assets, as well as be easily embedded inside applications, as well as be able to offer self-custodial setups." The Palisade acquisition positions Ripple alongside Fireblocks' acquisition of Dynamic, signaling industry recognition that custody solutions must span the full spectrum from institutional on-premise infrastructure to embedded wallet-as-a-service capabilities.

The challenge Simon identified resonates across financial institutions: "I've had countless conversations in the past week with several different financial institutions...explaining what wallet as a service is...all right, I can custody the assets, but then what? You're changing my mobile app or changing my online banking is going to take a long time."

Institutional Capitulation and the Narrative Shift

The roundtable discussion at the Future Investment Initiative featuring Jamie Dimon stating "crypto is real, stablecoins are real" represented what Li termed "dignified capitulation." As he noted, "It's great to see somebody so prominent really see reason." Stone Atwine identified the underlying driver: "There's a real shift from speculative tokens to real use cases now...real confidence in institutional, regulated rails...payments, Treasury, tokenization now is replacing crypto trading."

When Larry Fink questioned whether enough time is being spent on "how quickly we are going to tokenize every asset," Atwine's framework proved instructive: "I look at stablecoins more like the solution to improve payment rails and tokenized assets will be very, very interesting, where they try to put everything onchain, probably do a lot of yield on top of that...using payments stablecoins to move value and tokenize assets to store and grow that value."

The Stablecoin-Tokenization Flywheel

Sheffield outlined three critical connection points between stablecoins and tokenized assets that institutional players are pursuing:

• Tokenized treasuries as reserve backing: "You have shout out to M^0 and that team that they're using onchain collateral for the reserves...this stablecoin is backed by...super state as one of the tokenized assets"

• 24/7 trading settlement: "Being able across the world to get access to a tokenized version of Apple stock or some fund that you can then trade in real time for stablecoin"

• Collateralized lending: "Tokenized assets as collateral, to be able to use in a smart contract, to be able to borrow, and being able to have stablecoins as the way that those loans are dispersed"

As Cuy concluded, "Once you can represent many different types of assets onchain, what can you actually do with them? And it seems to me, the most interesting thing you can do with them is actually be able to use them as collateral and create new types of credit markets."

Unidirectional Flows: The Practical Starting Point

Stone Atwine provided crucial operational perspective on where stablecoin payments deliver immediate value: "The way I look at stablecoins really is to kind of play with the easiest or the most efficient use cases...speak to, let's say, Stripe or any PSPs that are collecting money out of Africa, and get them to collect from their African users in local currency. And we can settle them instantly using a stablecoin in those one direction flows, where Open AI or Spotify, or any of these global companies don't need to pay money back into Africa."

This unidirectional framework challenges assumptions about settlement mechanics. As Atwine explained, "For me, I'm not spending too much time thinking so hard about the complicated use cases. I'm looking more at the easier things, where these stablecoins can produce massive, massive value today." The pattern applies broadly: "One direction collections, one direction payments...a company that is in, let's say, here in London, and sends money to Nigeria or India, but that has no presence in India or Nigeria to send money back...we can allow them to make payments into Africa, one transaction at a time."

De Novo Assets and Risk Calibration

Li directed attention toward innovation beyond legacy asset migration: "What are new assets you can build that previously were not possible? I think that's what excites me the most...if you think about a company using stablecoin rails, you could effectively create this sort of super first lien type credit instrument, where for each incremental new dollar that comes into that corporate, it pays down the debt first." This risk mitigation capability opens new credit flows, particularly across emerging markets.

However, Li issued a pointed warning on risk perception: "People's perceptions of stablecoin risks are reasonably well calibrated, because they have the scar tissue from Terra Luna...I think where risk perceptions are tremendously miscalibrated are actually in traditional financial markets." He highlighted two areas of concern: the S&P's transformation toward capital-intensive AI businesses with positive marginal costs, and private equity's retail expansion. As Li cautioned, "This democratization sales pitch is really cover for finding the next bag holder...to the extent that us as an industry enable this through this kind of tokenization sub thesis, we should be very careful."

Execution Timeline: From Strategy to Scale

Sheffield's assessment of institutional adoption timelines remains measured: "We kind of went from disinterest...to All right, this is going to stay. We need to come up with a strategy...I think now we're starting to go from all right, like we've been spending the past few months on this...How do we start to execute that strategy?" The reality: "In 2026 you'll start to see more like early stage pilots that start to come out from larger institutions. But I don't think you'll see many scaled products until 2027-2028."

The operational challenge extends beyond executive support: "Even if there's top down support in an organization...there's still a ton of work in educating people in between around how does this work? How do you mitigate the risks? Who are the right vendors? How do you onboard those vendors?"

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