🎙️ Ep. 71. Command Line Commerce & Payoneer Launches Stablecoin Payments

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This week on Tokenized Ep. 71, Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by Davis Hart, Founder & CEO of Omnia, a new company building stablecoin infrastructure for banks, and Robert Morgan, Head of Stablecoins at Payoneer, the veteran cross-border payments platform serving global SMBs. Davis returns to the show with a new venture born from the conviction that banks need help standing up stablecoin infrastructure in the current regulatory window. Rob makes his show debut fresh off Payoneer's partnership with Bridge to bring stablecoin payouts to its global merchant base.

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

We cover:

• Why Payoneer integrated stablecoin payouts - and the two customer use cases driving demand

• Bridge's conditional approval for a National Trust charter and what it signals for the GENIUS Act

• Five regional banks launching a tokenized deposit network on the Cari Network

• Why deposit flight fears are "dramatically overblown" - and where the real opportunity lies

• Apollo's Morpho deal and the $600 billion proof of concept for onchain lending

• Phantom's MCP server and the emergence of "command line commerce"

• What wallets as "mission control for money" could mean for treasury management

🎙️ Tokenized Podcast Live — NYC, March 25

Pssst. We're taking the podcast from behind the screen to up close and personal. Join 100+ leaders shaping the future of stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization at our live event during Digital Asset Summit NYC. One expert fireside chat. One live podcast recording. Made possible by Visa, presented by Mesh, powered by MomentumX Global.

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Stablecoins as Cross-Border Infrastructure, Not Just a Form Factor

Payoneer - an OG cross-border payments company serving SMBs in dozens of markets - just integrated stablecoins via Bridge. Not for a press release. Because its customers demanded faster, cheaper access to their funds. That's the signal worth paying attention to this week: the incumbents who already have the licensing, distribution, and trust are now bolting on stablecoin rails - and they're doing it because it solves real operational pain.

Robert Morgan framed Payoneer's move clearly: "In many ways, Payoneer was the original stablecoin. We'd take payment in, we'd offer a liability of our company and then deliver funds around the world."

The Bridge partnership enables two distinct use cases. First, businesses already receiving stablecoins - like a t-shirt seller in Vietnam - who today have to navigate unregulated local exchanges to convert to fiat. Second, and where Morgan sees more growth: "companies that don't actually want to see the stablecoin," where stablecoins serve as invisible rails for faster, cheaper settlement into markets with limited banking infrastructure.

As Cuy Sheffield put it, this is the competition that's good for the industry: "the next gen upstarts trying to create payout companies, and then the established payment providers saying, wait a minute, we've got the licensing, we've got the integrations… how do we add these capabilities?"

Meanwhile, Bridge received conditional approval for a National Trust charter. Davis Hart explained the strategic logic: "You get federal pre-emption. You have one regulator, not 50. And there's an expectation that it's going to be the best structure in which to become a GENIUS Act stablecoin issuer."

Tokenized Deposits: Networks Over Silos. And Beyond Payments

Five regional banks (Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bank) are building a tokenized deposit network on the Cari Network, led by former Comptroller Gene Ludwig.

Morgan brings firsthand experience here. He spent three years building a tokenized deposit network through the USDF Consortium with mid-sized regional and community banks. His take on the Cari effort: "If anyone can do it, Gene can. And where Gene leads, I usually follow." But his core question remains: "How will you interact with a JPM or another token?" Interoperability, not issuance, is still the bottleneck.

Sheffield noted: "If you have a tokenized deposit network… that, to me, is a lot more interesting" than banks doing it in isolation.

Hart pushed for more ambition: "Using tokenized deposit networks for US domestic payments is frankly uninteresting - we already have FedNow and RTP." He argued tokenized deposits are where stablecoins were in 2020, since "for four and a half years, the only potential issuers weren't allowed to utter the word blockchain."

On deposit flight, Hart was blunt: "You can go get a savings account that will give you three and a quarter percent, yet the average yield on a savings account in the United States is 39 basis points. Deposits don't move that much for yield."

His framework: stablecoins are useful outside the networks you can build; tokenized deposits are useful inside them. Both will coexist, and the smart play is to start with stablecoins today and switch to deposit tokens when they mature.

Onchain Lending: The Story Banks Should Be Watching

Apollo's cooperation agreement with Morpho drew healthy skepticism from the panel on the press release itself, but strong conviction on the direction. Morgan made the sharpest observation: "If I were a bank, I'd actually be looking at announcements like this as the real opportunities, more than tokenized deposits. If you're worried about a funding crunch, the idea that having a loan onchain can access new pools of capital, lower your cost of funds… I think that's really interesting."

Sheffield provided the data: over $600 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have been originated in the last five years.

He was direct about the implications: "If I was the head of digital assets at a bank, I would probably be spending 95% of my time on onchain lending."

Morgan connected this directly to community banks: "They know how to underwrite credit in those communities. If they can tap into something like this to find ways to bring cheaper source of funds in for those loans to power that growth… the community bank of the future still knows their local market better than anyone else but is able to plug into this infrastructure." His advice was pointed - community banks should be knocking down the door on the loan side, less worried about the deposit substitution side.

Both BlackRock (via Uniswap) and Apollo (via Morpho) are building on public chains. As Hart noted, "They're going to where the value already is… you can start with stablecoins today and build all the institutional capabilities, and then when a deposit token comes along, it's a very small switch."

Command Line Commerce and Wallets as Mission Control

Phantom's new MCP server - enabling AI agents to swap, sign, and manage addresses - prompted the panel to think about where commerce is heading. Hart pointed to Cloudflare's push for micropayments as the moment it all clicked: "That was the moment where AI, stablecoins, crypto all comes together. High volume transactions at very small values."

Morgan flagged the control question: "I don't want to give Claude my credit card, but I might give it something with a $100 limit." The ability to program wallets with specific purpose and spending limits - with full auditability - matters. As Morgan put it, "the SMB of the future may actually be an agent."

The wallet discussion went deeper than agents, though. Sheffield described a future where wallets become "almost like mission control for money - all of your bank money is in one place. You can make a transaction and decide, do I want to fund it with my B of A money or my JPM money?"

Hart connected this to the enterprise world, noting that treasury management systems already do the first part of this - "they charge tens of thousands of dollars per year for one person to have an interface where they can see balances and make money move" - but they're only available to companies that can afford them.

The wallet construct, with its cryptographic authorization and identity layer, could deliver that same capability far more broadly - and decouple bank money from the bank interface.

Looking Ahead

The throughline from this episode is clear: stablecoins are graduating from a crypto talking point to a piece of institutional plumbing. Payoneer's integration shows incumbents moving. The GENIUS Act and trust charter applications are creating a regulatory pathway. Onchain lending infrastructure is where the real disruption to banking may come - not from deposit flight, but from more efficient capital markets. And the early shape of agentic commerce is forming, with programmable wallets offering both the control layer that institutional adoption requires and a rethink of how businesses interact with their money across providers. The question isn't whether these pieces converge. It's how quickly.

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