🎙️ Ep. 68. Every Bank Will Launch a Stablecoin

If you're reading this and still haven't signed up, click the subscribe button below!

In Episode 68 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor is joined by three industry voices bringing distinct perspectives to this week's conversation:

• Bam Azizi – CEO & Founder of Mesh, the payments infrastructure company that just closed a $75 million round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventures

• Kirill Gertman – CEO of Conduit, an on/off-ramp network operating in 30+ countries that handles the actual mechanics of moving funds across stablecoins and fiat

• Dogan Alpaslan – Researcher at cyber•Fund, bringing an investor's lens and emerging market experience from building an on-chain neobank in Turkey

The signal worth tracking from this week's discussion: "I think every asset manager, probably every large enough corporation, every e-commerce marketplace, certainly every fintech, will have their own stablecoin," according to Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman. 

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

We cover:

• Why Mesh's $1B valuation signals the growing value of payments abstraction networks

• Fidelity's FIDD stablecoin and the coming flood of institutional issuers

• How UBS offering Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to wealthy clients pressures competitors

• Tether's dual play with USAT and gold as it positions for a post-dollar world

• Why stablecoins trade at a premium to cash in the Global South

• The infrastructure moat thesis: networks are the only defensible asset in payments

 The Network Is the Only Moat

Mesh's billion-dollar fundraise underscores a theme the panel kept returning to: in payments, the only defensible position is distribution. As Bam Azizi explained, "our thesis is fairly simple... we strongly believe that the future of economy will be tokenized, everything from real estate to equity to deposit."

The challenge? Fragmentation. The future will have many wallets, L1s and L2s, issuers, and stablecoins - and navigating that complexity is where infrastructure players differentiate.

Kirill Gertman drew a useful distinction: "Mesh is an abstraction layer. They don't touch the money. We do." Conduit handles the actual conversion mechanics - pyUSD to USDC, then to MXN or BRL - through their network of banking partnerships.

Bam put it plainly: "There's no moat in payments except for the network. The network is the only moat."

Fidelity's Stablecoin and the Wildcat Banking Parallel

Fidelity's announcement of FIDD, their own dollar-backed stablecoin, prompted Kirill to reach back to the 1850s Wildcat banking era, when Ohio dollars didn't trade at par with New York dollars. We could return to that state, he warned, "where we have multiple versions of essentially the same thing... but they're not all going to be equal to each other."

From Bam's perspective, this is good for consumers long-term: "Competition is good for consumers from fee perspective, but not from UI/UX perspective... all of these stablecoins will be at par and it will be hidden from users' perspective. You're just interacting with US dollar."

What's notable here is the quiet positioning of asset managers. While the bank lobby and crypto lobby fight over yield, players like Fidelity - who don't have FDIC-insured charters but do have settlement charters - are becoming what look like "very large, narrow banks."

Tether's Two-Front Strategy

Tether's launch of USAT (the US-compliant stablecoin) alongside aggressive gold accumulation - buying more than the Polish central bank last quarter - is drawing attention. Kirill sees the USAT/USDT interoperability as potentially bigger than the market appreciates: "If you can interchange between them, that creates interesting opportunities for actually maybe off-ramping back into US dollars through USAT, or on-ramping in the US through USAT, but then actually using USDT in Brazil or in Nigeria."

Dogan offered perhaps the sharpest ground-level insight: "In Turkey, in Africa, in Asia, no one uses Circle. I can clearly say that everyone uses Tether... In most places, they value the USDT more than $1."

This premium over physical cash exists because USDT is "super easy to move," making USAT's potential one-to-one conversion a significant unlock for users locked out of the Western financial system.

 UBS and the Competitive Pressure on Private Banks

UBS's move to offer Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to wealthy clients in Switzerland isn't just about serving demand - it's a forcing function for competitors. As Dogan Alpaslan observed, "UBS, like big private banks, just increases the pressure for the other private banks to serve crypto to their customers, which is beneficial for all the customers."

There's also a geopolitical dimension worth noting. Swiss banks have long positioned themselves as neutral safe havens, but Dogan pointed out that "the localization of the world that we are having today is pushing themselves to be more political. And I think crypto can be a way to avoid it."

Kirill added that demand isn't limited to ultra-high-net-worth clients: "Demand cuts across every possible consumer segment, from the high net worth to middle class to underbanked retail customers in Sub-Saharan Africa... and I think the demand is still very much unsatisfied."

For banks looking to enter the space, Bam's advice was pointed: "Don't build your own L1 and L2. Please don't do that. Just stick to stablecoin or other types of assets and tokenize assets. Don't fragment the already fragmented market."

Banks don't own SWIFT, Fedwire, or ACH - the same logic should apply to blockchain infrastructure.

Looking Ahead

The panel's forward view: expect more bank consortia issuing stablecoins (at least three are in discussion), federated networks like M0 enabling long-tail issuers to access shared liquidity, and continued abstraction at the UX layer to hide complexity from end users.

As Bam summarized the endgame: "We'll have a global central bank, and we'll have something that is not owned by one single country. That's the future, whether we like it or not."

Thanks so much for reading the Tokenized Newsletter!

Please share this edition or share it with your colleagues if you enjoyed it!

Disclaimers