🎙️ Ep. 70. Erebor: Palmer Luckey’s Bank for Stablecoins

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This week on Episode 70 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by two returning friends of the show: Diogo Mónica, General Partner at Haun Ventures - an engineer-turned-capital-allocator who sits on the boards of two federally chartered banks, including Erebor - and Chris Maurice, CEO of Yellow Card, Africa's leading stablecoin infrastructure company on the front lines of cross-border payments for corporates and institutions across emerging markets.

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

We cover:

• Why BlackRock's Uniswap listing matters more for payments than investment

• How 24/7 tokenized money market-to-stablecoin swaps could unlock corporate treasury use cases

• Stripe's bet on machine payments via x402 - and why card rails may stick around longer than crypto expects

• The privacy vs. scalability tension holding back institutional blockchain adoption

• LayerZero's Zero chain and whether "cloud-grade" blockchains change the distribution game

• Erebor's launch as the first new federally chartered bank in 25 years

• Why the agentic payments space has more protocols than transactions

BlackRock on Uniswap: The Payments Angle Everyone's Missing

BlackRock buying UNI tokens and listing BUIDL on Uniswap (with Securitize handling whitelisting and Wintermute providing liquidity) drew the most attention this week. Diogo Mónica framed it with characteristic precision: "I do think it is a little bit of a templated move, in the sense that it is a very safe move with the access restrictions, with the white listing… Step two is figuring out how to then actually do true DeFi and truly pools that are mixed whitelisted and not whitelisted." Chris Maurice agreed this is "step one," noting that "the user experience of DeFi doesn't work for your average institution, or corporate buyer."

The more interesting thread was the payments angle. Cuy Sheffield argued that BUIDL-on-Uniswap could let a corporate treasurer "sit on BUIDL, but then the moment they want to make a B2B payment, swap into USDC or USDT or USDG and be able to send it out." Diogo noted that existing custodians like Anchorage could already intermediate that trade - taking on the overnight redemption risk. Simon Taylor added the reality check: "If that's not happening, it's because there's not as much demand as people thought there was going to be, and people aren't actually moving that much on the weekends. It is a nice to have and maybe not a need to have."

Machine Payments: More Protocols Than Transactions

Stripe's launch of machine payments via x402 using USDC on Base diagnosed a real friction point. Cuy Sheffield, fresh from his own vibe coding deep-dive, put it plainly: "I'm struck by how many times I want to do something and it's like, oh, I can't make a payment... it breaks the flow."

But Diogo Mónica pushed back on the assumption that stablecoins are the obvious winner for all agentic commerce: "AI is so good that it can actually go through all the flows and can actually pay with all of the cards... I actually don't want the agents to go use some blockchain thing that is actually like instant settlement with dazzle protections, because they actually want the card itself."

Chris Maurice landed on a pragmatic middle ground: "Long term, you end up in a world where machine-to-machine payments are all happening onchain. I do think that Visa card payments will be the bridge for that. And I think that the tail for card payments will be longer than people expect."

The honest truth? The space is fragmented and pre-traction. Simon Taylor mapped the emerging landscape - Google's A2A protocol, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, ERC-8004, Google's AP2, OpenAI/Stripe's ACP, Google/Shopify's UCP, and x402 for machine-level coordination - and concluded there are "more protocols than transactions."

Diogo was equally direct from the capital allocation side: "There's no clarity of thought... it's been hard to find people that have truly, kind of like, this clear thesis about a hypothesis of the future."

LayerZero's Zero: Scalability Solved, Privacy Still the Blocker

LayerZero unveiled its Zero L1 - backed by Citadel, arc, and Tether, with collaborations involving ICE, the DTCC, and Google Cloud - claiming 2 million TPS per zone with infinite horizontal scaling.

Diogo framed it as more than a chain: "It is a full cloud... that has all of the characteristics that you'd get from a cloud in which you can have arbitrary compute, arbitrary storage, arbitrary execution."

Chris Maurice offered the ground-level counterpoint: for actual payments clients, "they don't care about transactions per second... It's a much more simplistic equation: is my money going to get there? And how long is it going to take?" Distribution to corporates, he stressed, "is a lot less based on the technology than people in the industry think."

The bigger institutional unlock, the panel agreed, isn't scalability - it's privacy. Cuy Sheffield flagged that "in every conversation I'm having with institutions and enterprises, they're actually not worried about scalability... they're worried about privacy."

Chris confirmed this is the first question from banks, especially in emerging markets: "Is somebody able to see transactions coming into my system and then front-run currency markets, in markets and currencies that don't take billions of dollars to move?"

Diogo provided the strategic logic for why privacy stays off L1s: "If you are a layer one, actually the maximal optimal strategy, if you're doing the game theory, is not to have privacy on the layer one" - because it hinders integration with infrastructure players. Instead, "privacy is left as an exercise for the reader" at higher layers.

Erebor: The 24/7 Bank That Launched on a Sunday

Erebor - Palmer Luckey-backed federally chartered bank, backed by $635 million in regulatory capital at a $4.35 billion valuation - is now live.

Diogo, who sits on the board and led the seed investment as Haun Ventures, confirmed: "I've already deposited stablecoins on it, so I can give you the thumbs up, that it does actually work."

The bank is structurally different from traditional institutions: a 12% tier one leverage ratio (double typical requirements), over 60% of assets in cash or high-quality liquid investments, and - pointedly - it launched on a Sunday as a signal that "this is 24/7 and the age of the weekday bank is over."

Chris Maurice connected it to the post-Choke Point reality: "This is a direct response to choke point and everything that you've seen over the last several years, where US and many other companies were losing all of their bank accounts just because we were doing crypto." He added that Yellow Card recently opened its first tier-one bank account - evidence that "the access to banking has changed drastically over the course of about a year."

The bottom line: The infrastructure layer is maturing across every dimension - BlackRock's first onchain liquidity pool, the first crypto-native federal bank charter in a generation, and blockchain platforms reaching cloud-grade performance. But two persistent gaps define what comes next: privacy at the institutional layer, and finding real traction - not just protocols - in agentic commerce.

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