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Episode 5 of The Future of Finance is OPEN tackles a problem that sits underneath everything else weâve discussed on this podcast. We can move money faster, cheaper, and across more borders than ever before. But none of it works if you canât answer one deceptively simple question: who is on the other side?
Our guest is Melodie Lamarque, VP of Identity and Compliance at Fireblocks. Her path to the problem started early. She wrote a paper on blockchain at MIT in 2015, advised by Christian Catalini, a previous guest on this show, and fell in love with the technology before most of the industry had noticed it. Then she did something unusual for a true believer: she went into traditional finance first, handling M&A in Paris and digital assets in New York at JPMorgan, before moving into venture capital in London. In 2022 she left to co-found the Keyring Network with Alex McFarlane, and last year she joined Fireblocks to take the same problem to institutional scale.
I first met Melodie at the tail end of Sibos. While everyone else was drinking champagne and packing up to leave, the two of us sat in a corner for forty-five minutes going deep on identity. That conversation stayed with me. This episode is the continuation of it.
The Tooling Was Never the Problem
Melodie said something early in the conversation that reframes most of the last decade of crypto. We have built magnificent tools. Complex, genuinely impressive tools. The issue has never been the technology. It was regulation, or more precisely, the absence of clarity about what institutions were actually allowed to do.
This explains the pattern she watched play out from the inside. Some institutions went the full DeFi route, touching everything with little regard for the rules. Others stayed away entirely. The middle path: regulated, secure, and still useful went unexplored not because it was technically impossible but because the risk of guessing wrong was too high. When the rules are unclear, the rational institution does nothing. That hesitation, not any missing piece of code, is what held the industry back.
Solving for DeFi Without a Gatekeeper
Keyringâs question was always the same: how do you verify the person or company behind a wallet address without writing that risk information onto a public blockchain for everyone to see? A startup canât simply declare a new standard and expect the world to adopt it. So Melodie and Alex found a niche instead. They built a way for institutions to touch the riskiest part of the chain, DeFi, in a way that felt safe enough to actually try.
The mechanism is worth understanding because it points at where this is all heading. Using zero-knowledge credentials together with a technology called ZK-TLS, a user can extract verifiable proof of identity from a source theyâve already been verified against their bank, their Coinbase account and package it into a cryptographic proof, and attach it to a non-custodial wallet. The result was one of the first scalable ways to build a permissioned pool in DeFi where participants could come from anywhere. No central gatekeeper needed to know where they were from. The institutions on the other side simply knew that everyone in the pool had been checked somewhere credible.
Melodie is refreshingly honest about the limits of the technology that gave Keyring its early appeal. Zero-knowledge proofs created real FOMO among institutions, which benefited her startup. But sheâll happily tell you that for small-scale experimentation between trusted partners, the cryptographic magic adds almost nothing. The value of dissociating a real-world identity from a wallet address only shows up at scale, where a database of linked identities becomes a honeypot worth attacking.
Fix the Boring Problem First
The phrase that everyone reaches for is âthe future of digital identityâ agentic payments, self-sovereign credentials, the decentralised frontier. Melodieâs instinct is to slow that conversation down. There is a far less glamorous problem sitting in front of it that almost no one has solved: how do two parties simply identify each other and exchange information in order to move money?
Today that is genuinely hard. If youâre a fintech or a new bank and your customer wants to send a transfer to the outside world, you have remarkably few tools to reliably know the counterparty and then communicate with them securely. Melodieâs view is that this plumbing, closer to how SWIFT works between custodians than to anything crypto-native, has to come first. The custodian on each side identifies the other, then passes down the information about the individual behind the transaction. It is unglamorous, and it is the foundation everything else depends on.
I pushed on this because the gap sheâs describing is real. The FIDO Alliance, passkeys, we are still mostly validating that this is the right device, not that this is the right person. We have built proxies for identity and started to believe they are identity. Getting down to the actual beneficial owner is the work that remains.
Standardising the Handshake
Editorâs note: We didnât cover this on the episode, but it speaks so directly to Melodieâs point about solving the boring problem first that it belongs here. Fireblocks has since launched the Open Transaction Layer, or OTL, an open, permissionless protocol that takes aim at exactly the gap she described.
OTL leaves settlement to the blockchains. It isnât trying to be another chain or another network. Instead it standardises the handshake that has to happen around a transaction: proving who you are, exchanging the originator-and-beneficiary information the Travel Rule requires, verifying the counterparty, and negotiating trust before any money moves. This is the SWIFT-like messaging layer Melodie kept returning to, written for a world of wallets rather than a world of correspondent banks. The Travel Rule, for anyone outside compliance, is the regulation that obliges the two institutions in a transfer to pass each other identifying details about the sender and the recipient, the digital equivalent of the paperwork that has always travelled alongside a wire transfer.
What makes OTL interesting is what it deliberately refuses to be. There is no central operator, no shared registry, and no pre-approved consortium deciding whoâs allowed in. Personal data never sits in a central pool waiting to be breached; it travels only end-to-end encrypted, peer to peer, over what are called DIDComm channelsâsecure direct lines between two partiesâ decentralised identifiers, so the information goes straight from one to the other and nowhere else. Anyone who controls an HTTPS domain can join, the same low bar as putting up a website. And crucially, each participant decides for itself whom to trust, rather than deferring to some network-wide authority that grants or revokes the right to transact.
That last design choice is the one that matters most to me, and it echoes everything Melodie said about open standards. A network with a single gatekeeper is just the old walled garden wearing new clothes. A protocol where trust is decided at the edges, by the participants themselves, is the version that can actually scale to the merchants, creators, and individuals who have never been let into the room. It avoids the honeypot Melodie warned about, it puts the verification burden where it belongs, and it leaves the door open rather than locked. Whether OTL becomes the standard or simply moves the conversation forward, it is pointed at the right problem.
The Arms Race, and Who Can Afford to Win It
Identity verification is an arms race, and AI has made it faster and nastier. Fraud is getting better at exactly the rate that detection is trying to keep up. What struck me most in Melodieâs framing is that this is, at heart, a question of money. Doing identity properly is expensive. The largest, most sophisticated players: the big banks, the well-funded third-party providers, can pour resources into staying ahead. Smaller players cannot.
Her conclusion has an uncomfortable logic to it. The compliance burden and liability may need to concentrate on the biggest institutions precisely because theyâre the only ones who can afford to fight the fraud effectively, with smaller players relying on them through lighter, inherited requirements. We have the tools: biometrics, cryptographic signatures, time-bound tokens. However, tools alone donât decide the outcome. The resources behind them do.
The Inclusion Question I Couldnât Let Go Of
This is where I leaned on Melodie, because itâs the part I care about most. For years the financial inclusion community has argued for tiered KYC: simplified due diligence at the bottom, scaling up as transaction values grow. It gives access to people who canât produce two forms of ID and a proof of address, while still offering some visibility into activity that is, in cash, completely invisible.
The recent update to FATFâs Recommendation 16, in my reading, didnât move us forward here. If anything it added burden, landing hardest on the small institutions and on the end users who never had the data being demanded of them. So I asked her directly how the gap actually closes for someone who has, say, a mobile money identity, one anchor, not the whole shebang.
Her answer is where the optimism lives. For exactly these people, crypto can be genuinely helpful. Tiered requirements are the right model, and a digital footprint can become more than a check box: it can build a verifiable reputation, a portable credit history, a record of financial behaviour that someone with no formal banking trail has never been able to carry with them. These are the corridors where the technology can actually make a difference. A stablecoin payment between the US and Europe saves you very little. A verifiable identity and a credit history for someone the formal system has never seen can change the economic landscape of an entire population.
What Singapore and Brazil Got Right
The conversation turned to government digital ID, which is far more emotive than its plumbing would suggest. Europeâs identity wallet is mandated to reach retail users by the end of 2027, and it will help onboarding, fraud resistance, authentication. But Melodie is candid that the deeper benefits arrive later, and that the EUâs many countries and competing agendas make a clean rollout difficult.
I find the contrast with other markets revealing. India, Brazil and Singapore got there first, and Singapore in particular has done something I havenât seen elsewhere: it lets you abstract your identity, creating credentials that are connected to the source yet able to stand apart from it. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Today, when I check into a hotel and show my passport, my government doesnât learn that I stayed there. But with a centralised digital ID validated against its source every time itâs used, the system quietly collects the metadata: who asked, what day, which location. That is the road to a surveillance state. Abstraction, with offline or local verification against a directory of authorised signatures, is how you prove you are who you say you are without leaving that trail behind.
Brazilâs Pix is the other case worth studying, and Melodie and I agreed on why it worked. Itâs fairly centralised. The regulator pushed every bank in the country to adopt it. But what made it succeed is that Brazil studied everyone else first, for example, they came to the UK, looked at why Paym failed, and learned. There are perhaps half a dozen things you absolutely have to get right, and if you do, adoption takes off. Too many countries are still stuck in a âbuild it and they will comeâ mentality, which is exactly how these projects stall.
Know Your Agent
Then we looked at 2032, and the agentic economy. A major theme of the book is that compliance is moving toward far less human intervention. Melodie thinks weâre close, that with digitally signed credentials and the right data sources, identity verification could run almost entirely automated, with humans reserved for the genuinely hard cases. In simple KYC, thatâs already roughly how it works.
The more interesting layer is what happens when agents themselves transact. If we solve counterparty discovery and communication at scale, an agent could perform financial activities in a verifiable way on behalf of the person or company behind it, inheriting their compliance attributes. We already have KYC and KYB. I think weâre going to need KYA, know your agent, and KYD, know your device. The condition Melodie keeps returning to is that all of this has to be built on open standards that anyone can build on top of. Otherwise we simply rebuild the walled gardens weâre trying to escape.
Turning a Cost Centre Into a Revenue Centre
The episodeâs most counterintuitive idea concerns the banks. If digital identity becomes portable and user-controlled, the obvious assumption is that traditional gatekeepers lose a layer of revenue. Melodie flips it. Today, KYC isnât a revenue line for banks at all. Itâs a sunk cost and a liability. The only value they extract from it is stickiness: because you were verified with them and canât reuse that verification anywhere else, youâre effectively captive.
Open up identity and that captivity disappears. However, the ability to verify, not merely that youâre not on a sanctions list, but that your financial activity carries acceptable risk, is a capability the big institutions are well placed to keep, and to charge for. The thing they currently treat as a cost could become a service. They would have to compete on genuine value rather than lock-in, which is precisely the kind of competition that benefits everyone downstream. I hadnât thought about it that way going in. Itâs one of the golden nuggets I got out of this episode.
âThe tooling has never been the issue in crypto. Weâve built magnificent tools, complex tools, but the issue was regulation. There was no clarity on what they could do.â
That regulation is now coming, with MiCA in Europe, GENIUS and CLARITY in the US and several other jurisdictions introducing regulation for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs).
đ§ Listen to the Full Episode
The full conversation goes deeper on Keyringâs early interviews with TradFi and the misconceptions they revealed, why JPMorganâs wholesale focus left the open problem untouched, the difference between selective transparency and total surveillance, what the EU identity wallet shares with the CBDC backlash, and why the corridors that matter most for inclusion are the ones where these tools genuinely change lives.
Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Key Timestamps
* 00:00 â Introduction and why Melodie joined the podcast
* 02:00 â From an MIT blockchain paper to JPMorgan, VC, and Keyring
* 06:00 â The Keyring problem: verifying whoâs behind a wallet
* 09:00 â Zero-knowledge credentials, ZK-TLS, and permissioned DeFi
* 13:00 â Why build it alone instead of inside an institution
* 16:00 â Moving to Fireblocks: scale, reach, and neutral ground
* 20:00 â Fix the boring problem first: counterparty identification
* 25:00 â The fraud arms race and who can afford to win it
* 29:00 â Tiered KYC, Recommendation 16, and financial inclusion
* 34:00 â Digital ID: the EU, India, Brazilâs Pix, and Singapore
* 39:00 â Surveillance, abstraction, and preserving privacy
* 42:00 â The agentic economy, KYA, and open standards
* 45:00 â Turning bank compliance from a cost centre into a revenue centre
Connect
Melodie Lamarque: LinkedIn | Fireblocks
The Future of Finance is OPEN. Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox.
Have thoughts on digital identity, tiered KYC, or the agentic economy? Reply to this email, we read everything.
â Arunjay & Ian
Disclaimer: The views and information shared here are for general informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, legal, or other professional advice. Authors do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the content. Products and services mentioned may not be available in all jurisdictions and are subject to applicable regulations. Listeners and readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult with a qualified advisor before making any financial decisions.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com -
Episode 4 of The Future of Finance is OPEN features one of the most grounded voices in the stablecoin space. Chris Mason is the co-founder of Orbital, a cross-border payments platform that has been quietly building at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets for eight years, long before most of the industry showed up.
Chris spent over 25 years in leadership roles at Citi, First Data, and Worldline. He founded commercial cards in Europe for Citi, ran their cross-border product World Link, and operated a joint venture for First Data. But the corporate politics eventually wore thin, and at 49, he decided to build something of his own. Orbital started as a multi-currency banking platform, pivoted to stablecoins within a year, and has been processing digital dollar payments ever since, bootstrapped, profitable, and now running at a $12 billion annual run rate.
This is a conversation about whatâs actually happening on the ground, not whatâs being announced on stage.
US Banks Are Strangling Economies
Chris doesnât mince words on the core problem. US banks have had a stranglehold on dollar clearing, and their risk appetite or lack of it is cutting off entire economies. Countries deemed âhigh riskâ in the emerging markets find themselves locked out of the correspondent banking system. Banks would rather say no to an entire region than invest in the compliance infrastructure to say yes safely.
The result is that legitimate businesses in the global south struggle to access the worldâs reserve currency. Chrisâs view: stablecoins are the working answer, right now, for businesses that need to move dollars across borders without waiting days or paying extortionate fees.
Bootstrapped in a World of Billion-Dollar Raises
One of the most striking things about Orbital is what they didnât do. While competitors raised tens and hundreds of millions, Chris bootstrapped. The founders still own over 90% of the business. They raised a modest 6 million Euro after years of self-funding.
Chris credits his corporate background, years of operating on tight budgets, zero headcount approvals, and finding creative ways to grow at Citi, with building the discipline that made bootstrapping possible. And he makes a provocative point: with AI now transforming what a team of 130 people can do, not having raised massive rounds may actually be an advantage.
The downside? Less marketing firepower than competitors. But Chris says thatâs changed in the last 12 months, with quality inbound leads now flowing consistently.
The Conversation Is Outrunning the Traction
This might be the most important observation in the entire episode. Chris is candid: the hype around stablecoins is currently ahead of the reality.
Big banks are under enormous pressure to announce something. Partnerships are being proclaimed that lack regulatory foundations. Companies with no licenses are declaring theyâll bring stablecoins to market. And internally, a lot of what the major banks are doing with stablecoins is intergroup treasuryâuseful, but not the kind of customer-facing problem-solving that will transform payments.
Chris draws a clear line between announcements and execution. Getting a financial institution from initial conversation to actual transactions takes time. You need licenses (Orbitalâs Gibraltar licensing alone took two years), crypto-friendly banking partners, RegTech infrastructure, and compliance frameworks. If any single pillar is missing, you canât transact.
The explosion in real-world stablecoin volumes, he believes, is still ahead of us.
The Tether Question
One of the most interesting threads in the conversation is Chrisâs assessment of Tetherâs position. While many in the industry are excited about new stablecoin issuers emerging post-GENIUS Act, Chris points out a fundamental challenge: Tether has the global liquidity. If you want to transact in USDC in many emerging markets, the liquidity simply isnât there.
Could Citi or JP Morgan issue stablecoins that overtake Tetherâs circulation? Technically, yes. They could do it with US domestic volume alone. But Chris asks the harder question: what problem are they actually solving for customers? Moving internal treasury balances onto a blockchain isnât the same as enabling a business in Lagos to receive payment from a supplier in Dubai.
Dislodging Tetherâs network effects will be a serious challenge. People, and entire economies, have embedded themselves in particular payment methods, and history shows they donât switch easily.
The Orbital Index: What the Real Numbers Show
Orbital has built a stablecoin index, filtering out high-frequency trading to focus on genuine customer payments. The findings are revealing.
Circle dominates North America. Tether dominates most of the rest of the world. Thereâs been a slow but accelerating migration away from Tron to cheaper blockchains like Binance Smart Chain and Polygon, though Chris notes that users are surprisingly loyal to their preferred chains, even when transaction costs are multiples higher.
Perhaps most fascinating is Orbitalâs monitoring of stablecoin premiums in emerging markets. Buying USDT with Nigerian Naira, for example, typically costs more than buying traditional US dollars. These premiums vary dramatically and arenât always explainable. Theyâre driven by a mix of supply and demand, regulatory uncertainty, and capital controls. As Chris puts it, stablecoins are âthe leaky bucket against monetary policy and currency control.â
AI and the Future of Compliance
Arunjay pushes Chris on a core thesis from the book: can regulatory compliance be 80% automated by AI, with humans in the loop for the remaining 20%?
Chris is blunt about the current state of RegTech: heâs unimpressed. Most platforms fall short, particularly when youâre combining crypto and traditional finance. But what Orbital is doing with AI internally is genuinely exciting. Theyâre mining plausible counterparties by industry, if a trading platform suddenly starts paying charities, thatâs a red flag. AI can surface these patterns at a scale and speed that human analysts simply canât match.
His broader point is powerful: blockchain analytics combined with AI creates a compliance capability thatâs actually superior to traditional banking. You can see where funds have come from. You can identify wallet ownership patterns through transaction analysis. Transaction monitoring can be taken to âa whole new levelâ with on-chain data. The irony is that the industry widely perceived as the compliance risk may end up having better compliance tools than the banks that rejected it.
Can SWIFT Survive?
Chris doesnât think SWIFT can make the leap to 24/7 real-time settlement. The ownership structure, the DNA of the organisation, he just canât see it happening. And that, he argues, is precisely why the industry is so excited about stablecoins as cross-border rails.
His vision for the future: as emerging market regulators follow the US and Europe in creating clear stablecoin frameworks, foreign exchange markets will begin to mirror fiat markets. Premiums will compress. Transparency will increase. The days of correspondent banks sitting on funds for five days to boost their P&L will end.
But he also sees something more radical: a parallel world where digital dollars circulate without ever converting back to fiat. In many emerging markets, this is already happening. The desire to hold stablecoins over local currency is so strong that entire payment flows are staying on-chain.
âUS banks have had a real stranglehold on US dollars. The banks that do all the clearing are kind of strangling economies, really. The answer, I guess, or one of the answers, could be stablecoin.â
The Education Gap
If thereâs one theme Chris returns to throughout the conversation, itâs education. The crypto industry, he argues, doesnât help itself. Three different names for every blockchain, intellectualising jargon, and a culture that can be âconfusing by design.â Most compliance officers globally still donât fully understand how stablecoin compliance works. And many CFOs donât realise you can accept stablecoins and auto-convert to fiat without ever holding digital assets on your balance sheet.
The fundamentals of anti-money laundering are the same. Itâs just managed differently. And if anything, the transparency of blockchain makes it more powerful, not less.
đ§ Listen to the Full Episode
The full conversation also covers Chrisâs time building commercial cards across 20 European markets at Citi, the StripeâBridge acquisition as a market inflection point, why PayPalâs stablecoin struggles led to a CEO departure, the relationship between monetary policy and stablecoin premiums, and a lively debate about whether emerging market central banks should hold Tether reserves.
Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Key Timestamps
* 00:00 â Introduction and Chrisâs corporate payments background
* 05:00 â Why he left Worldline to co-found Orbital at 49
* 09:00 â Bootstrapping vs. raising: owning 90%+ of the business
* 13:00 â Partnerships: ClearBank, Sumsub, and why you canât do it alone
* 18:00 â The conversation is outrunning the traction
* 22:00 â Tetherâs network effects and the liquidity challenge
* 26:00 â The Orbital Stablecoin Index: what the real numbers show
* 31:00 â Stablecoin premiums and the âleaky bucketâ against monetary policy
* 35:00 â AI-powered compliance and mining plausible counterparties
* 39:00 â Can SWIFT survive? The case for stablecoin rails
* 43:00 â The parallel digital dollar economy in emerging markets
Connect
Chris Mason â LinkedIn | Orbital
The Future of Finance is OPEN. Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox.
Have thoughts on cross-border payments, stablecoin adoption, or the future of SWIFT? Reply to this email, we read everything.
â Arunjay & Ian
Disclaimer: The views and information shared here are for general informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, legal, or other professional advice. Authors do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the content. Products and services mentioned may not be available in all jurisdictions and are subject to applicable regulations. Listeners and readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult with a qualified advisor before making any financial decisions.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Weâre back with Episode 3 of The Future of Finance is OPEN. This week, we sat down with Mike RingerâFounder of ReStabilise, the UK startup on a mission to put the British Pound on-chain.
Mike is a lawyer turned founder. He spent years as a partner and head of the crypto and digital assets group at CMS, one of Europeâs largest law firms, before making the leap to build what the UK has been missing: an institutional-grade, fully regulated GBP stablecoin. His co-founder Dave Lemmens brings equally serious credentialsâformer UK Head of Product at SWIFT and CIO for Payments at Deutsche Bank.
Their thesis starts with a paradox: GBP is the worldâs fourth most traded currency, yet it represents a microscopic fraction of the global stablecoin supply. Mike believes the UKâs regulatory gap, not a lack of demand, is whatâs held things back. And with the FCAâs new stablecoin regime finally taking shape, that gap is about to close.
The British Paradox
Hereâs the striking fact that opens the conversation: there is essentially no regulated GBP stablecoin in circulation today. The dollar dominates stablecoin supply through Tether and Circle. The euro has some activity under MiCA. But sterling? Almost nothing.
Itâs not that thereâs no demand. Itâs that the UK has lacked a regulatory framework. Without clear rules, no serious institutional player has been willing to issue a GBP stablecoin. ReStabilise was founded specifically to fill that gap.
âTokenised Cashâ vs. âCrypto Stablecoinsâ
Mike draws a sharp distinction between what he calls âtokenised cashâ and the stablecoins most people think of.
The difference matters. Tokenised cash, as Mike defines it, is issued by regulated entities, fully backed by reserves held with the Bank of England or in UK gilts, and designed to maintain what the Bank of England calls âsingleness of moneyâ, the principle that a pound is a pound is a pound, regardless of who issued it or what form it takes.
This is the test that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has laid out: any new form of money must be fully interchangeable with existing forms. One pound in a stablecoin must always equal one pound in a bank account. Mikeâs entire business is built around passing that test.
The New Regime
The regulatory timeline is now concrete. ReStabilise has already submitted its application to the FCA. The formal application gateway opens in September 2026, with the full regime effective from October 2027.
The FCAâs approach differs from MiCA in Europe in important ways. The UK wants what Mike describes as a âmulti-moneyâ systemâcentral bank digital currencies, tokenised bank deposits, and regulated stablecoins all coexisting and interoperable. Itâs not picking winners between these forms; itâs building a framework where they can all work together.
One area of tension: capital requirements. The FCAâs proposed âK factorâ requires stablecoin issuers to hold capital equal to 2% of their volume. Mike argues this is too highâa point ReStabilise has pushed back on in its regulatory submissions. Getting this number right matters enormously for whether stablecoin issuance can be commercially viable at scale.
Editor's note: Since recording this episode, ReStabilise has been confirmed by the FCA as one of only 4 out of 20 applicants accepted into the new Stablecoins Cohort of the FCA's Regulatory Sandbox, a significant milestone that underscores the seriousness of what they're building. You can read the FCA's announcement here.
The Business Model
How does a regulated stablecoin issuer actually make money? Mike breaks it down into three revenue streams.
First, yield on backing assets. When you hold reserves in gilts or central bank deposits, you earn interest. This is the same model Circle uses, and itâs substantialâbut as Mike notes, itâs vulnerable to interest rate cycles and isnât enough on its own.
Second, Stablecoins as a Service (SCAS). This is ReStabiliseâs white-label offeringâbuilding and operating stablecoins for banks, fintechs, and other institutions that want their own branded tokenised money without building the infrastructure themselves. Think of it as stablecoin infrastructure-as-a-service.
Third, custody fees. ReStabilise is building as both an issuer and a custodian, which creates additional revenue from holding assets on behalf of clients.
The SCAS model is particularly interesting because it addresses a key insight: many banks and fintechs will want to offer tokenised money to their customers but wonât want to build the compliance, technology, and reserve management infrastructure from scratch.
Why Public Blockchains
Mike is unequivocal: public, permissionless blockchains are the right infrastructure for regulated stablecoins. Not private chains. Not permissioned networks.
This might seem counterintuitive for a compliance-focused lawyer, but his reasoning is clear. Public blockchains offer transparency, composability, and network effects that private chains canât match. And crucially, smart contracts give the issuer all the control they need for complianceâfreeze functions, blocklists, and programmable rules are all built into the token itself.
The control isnât at the chain level; itâs at the token level. Thatâs a subtle but powerful distinction.
The Geopolitical Dimension
The conversation takes a fascinating turn into geopolitics. The US GENIUS Act includes a reciprocity framework that could allow UK-regulated issuers to issue dollar stablecoins. Mike sees this as a massive opportunity: the UK could become the optimal jurisdiction for multi-currency stablecoin issuance, offering both GBP and USD tokens under a single regulatory umbrella.
Meanwhile, the EUâs MiCA framework has been more restrictive, and there are concerns about Euro stablecoins being used as a tool for dollar dominance rather than Euro sovereignty. China is pursuing its own path with the digital yuan. And emerging marketsâwhere stablecoins arguably matter most for financial inclusionâare watching all of this play out.
Mikeâs view: local currency stablecoins are essential for financial inclusion. A business in Latin America using dollar stablecoins for remittances is still exposed to dollar volatility. True financial empowerment means having access to stable digital representations of your own currency.
The Wallet Future
The episode closes with a vision that connects directly to our previous guest Tony McLaughlinâs thesis at Ubyx. Mike agrees that weâre heading toward a world where everyone has a digital wallet rather than just a traditional bank account.
But he adds an important nuance: this wonât just be crypto-native wallets like MetaMask. Traditional financial institutionsâasset managers, banks, custodiansâwill all offer wallet services. Your HSBC app might soon have your bank account on one tab and your digital wallet on another.
The key is interoperability. Different wallets, different chains, different token typesâall need to work together seamlessly. Mike is encouraged by the pace of UX improvement but acknowledges thereâs still a long way to go.
âThereâs nothing to stop this vision being realised. You have the brightest people in the world from a technical perspective, youâve got the regulatory clarity, and youâve got the consistently demonstrated use case benefits.â
The Pluralistic Vision
Perhaps the most important point Mike makes is about market structure. He doesnât want Tether and Circle to dominate stablecoin supply forever. He doesnât even want ReStabilise to be the only GBP stablecoin issuer.
What he wants is a pluralistic marketâmultiple issuers, multiple currencies, multiple chains, all fitting together in an interoperable ecosystem. Competition drives innovation. And critically, regulation needs to enable this competition without stifling access for the people who benefit most: the unbanked, the underserved, the small business owner in an emerging market who needs a stable digital store of value.
Itâs a delicate balance. But Mike believes the UK is uniquely positioned to get it rightâif regulators resist the urge to over-restrict.
đ§ Listen to the Full Episode
The complete conversation goes deeper on the FCA application process, Circleâs S-1 and what it reveals about stablecoin economics, the concept of âsecond mover advantage,â and why Mike isnât a fan of wrapped tokens.
Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Key Timestamps
* 00:00 â Introduction and Mikeâs background
* 04:00 â The British paradox: why no GBP stablecoin exists
* 09:00 â Tokenised cash vs. crypto stablecoins
* 14:00 â The FCAâs new regulatory regime and timeline
* 18:00 â Singleness of money and the Bank of Englandâs test
* 22:00 â ReStabiliseâs business model: yield, SCAS, and custody
* 27:00 â Why public blockchains beat private chains
* 31:00 â The GENIUS Act and UK as a multi-currency hub
* 35:00 â Geopolitics: dollar dominance, MiCA, and the digital yuan
* 39:00 â Financial inclusion and local currency stablecoins
* 42:00 â The wallet future and TradFi adoption
* 46:00 â Pluralistic markets and the path forward
Connect
Mike Ringer â LinkedIn | ReStabilise
The Future of Finance is OPEN â Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox.
Have thoughts on GBP stablecoins, UK regulation, or the multi-currency future? Reply to this emailâwe read everything.
â Arunjay & Ian
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com -
Weâre thrilled to release Episode 2 of The Future of Finance is OPEN. This week, we sat down with Tony McLaughlinâCEO of Ubyx and author of the Ubyx whitepaper thatâs been making waves in banking and crypto circles alike.
Tony spent two decades at Citibank leading payments innovation before founding Ubyx. His thesis is simple but profound: tokenized money needs clearing systems, just like checks and cards did. And whoever builds that infrastructure will reshape how money moves globally.
The Big Idea: Tokens Need Clearing
Hereâs the core insight from Tonyâs whitepaper: whether you represent promises to pay on paper, clay tablets, relational databases, or tokensâthe market structure is predictable.
When you have many issuers of tokenized money (stablecoins, tokenized deposits, money market funds) and many parties who need to accept them, you get a many-to-many network. Resolve that bilaterally and you need A Ă B connections. Build a clearing system and you only need A + B.
This is exactly what happened with checks, ACH, and card networks. Tony argues it will happen with tokenized money too.
Banks Wonât Sit This Out
One of the most striking observations: banks are not going to watch stablecoins eat their lunch.
Tokenized deposits are coming. Central banks want them. Commercial banks want them. The question isnât if but how theyâll compete with stablecoins.
Tonyâs answer: through the cash management use case. Corporate treasuries need interoperable tokenized deposits that preserve the bank relationship while offering the benefits of blockchain rails.
The World of Wallets
Your bank account is a âone trick ponyâ, it only holds one type of instrument: a liability of that bank in a particular currency. But wallets? Wallets can connect to multiple chains and hold multiple types of tokens.
Tonyâs prediction: Every bank and fintech on the planet will offer wallets connected to many chains.
Think about what that means. When your bank offers you a wallet that can hold tokenized deposits, stablecoins, tokenized stocks, and tokenized bonds, all accessible through one interface, the distinction between âTradFiâ and âWeb3â disappears.
âOnce everyoneâs got a wallet, Web Three and TradFi have merged.â
The General-Purpose Technology Always Wins
Tony draws a powerful analogy: remember when developing countries had to choose between laying copper telephone lines or going straight to mobile?
The same choice faces payment infrastructure today. Countries are still spending hundreds of millions on special-purpose payment rails (ACH, faster payments). But public blockchains are general-purpose technology, they can do everything those special-purpose systems can do, and more.
His prediction: traffic will increasingly flow over blockchain rails. Legacy systems wonât disappear overnight, but innovation will happen on the new infrastructure.
The Stone Soup Principle
When asked how Ubyx plans to build this ecosystem, Tony tells the old folk tale of stone soup. A stranger walks into an impoverished village with nothing but a stone. He starts making âsoupâ and gradually everyone contributes an onion, a carrot, some meatâuntil thereâs a feast for everyone.
The moral: everything needed for responsible adoption of tokenized money already exists in the community. Issuers, banks, fintechs, regulators, wallet providers, blockchain analytics companies. The coordination problem just needs someone to start the pot boiling.
What Needs to Be True
Rather than focus on blockers, Tony reframes the question: What needs to be true for this future to arrive?
The answer: regulated banks and fintechs need to be encouraged to participate on public blockchains. Right now, regulatory caution has prevented them from âsetting up shop on these streetsâ, creating a vacuum filled by unregulated parties.
The irony? Having banks present on public blockchains would make those ecosystems safer, not riskier. Like a bank branch making a rough neighbourhood more legitimate.
The Five-Year Vision
If Ubyx succeeds, what does global money movement look like in 2031?
Tonyâs vision: the default way of transferring and storing value is a token on a public chain. We wonât know which issuer or chain wins, but the paradigm shift is inevitable.
He draws the analogy to alarm clocks, calculators, and Walkmans. They all worked perfectly fine. They all got absorbed into the smartphone anyway.
âJust because something works today doesnât mean it doesnât get replaced.â
đïž Listen Now
The complete conversation covers much more: the business model sustainability question (what happens when interest rates drop?), why âsingleness of moneyâ matters, the UFO financing thought experiment, and Tonyâs take on whether Circle and Coinbase are really building âopenâ systems.
Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Key Timestamps
- 00:00 â Introduction and book overview
- 02:00 â The Ubyx whitepaper: tokenized money needs clearing
- 08:00 â Banks, tokenized deposits, and the wallet future
- 13:00 â Why wallets beat accounts
- 19:00 â Business model sustainability beyond interest income
- 23:00 â General-purpose vs. special-purpose technology
- 29:00 â Interoperability and the many-to-many problem
- 35:00 â Challenging Tony: arenât we seeing walled gardens?
- 39:00 â Milestones for the next 12 months
- 43:00 â The stone soup principle
- 48:00 â Five-year vision: tokens on chains as the default
Connect with Tony
Tony McLaughlin â LinkedIn | Ubyx
Additional reading: Ubyx white paper.
Whatâs Coming Next
Episode 3 features Mike Ringer, Founder & CEO of ReStabiliseâthe UK startup fighting to put the British Pound on-chain.
Hereâs the paradox: GBP is the worldâs fourth most traded currency, yet it represents a microscopic fraction of the global stablecoin supply. Why has the UK lagged so far behind? And with new FCA regulations finally taking shape in 2026, is there an opening for a âdigital poundâ that plays by different rules than the offshore giants?
The Future of Finance is OPEN â Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox.
Have thoughts on clearing systems, tokenized deposits, or the wallet future? Reply to this emailâwe read everything.
â Arunjay & Ian
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com -
For our debut episode, we sat down with Christian Catalini, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at LightSpark, co-creator of Libra/Diem and former Chief Economist of the Diem Association at Meta, founder of the MIT Crypto Economics Lab, and research scientist at MIT Sloan.
Christian was at the centre of one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape global payments. Now heâs applying those hard-won lessons to build something new on top of Bitcoin. This conversation covered the real lessons from Libra, why the stablecoin hype needs tempering, what Universal Money Addresses could unlock, and a concept Christian calls the âunbrokeredâ, a problem that goes well beyond the unbanked.
The Libra Story: âWe Were Just Earlyâ
Christian was candid about what went wrong with Libra. Despite assembling more than two dozen tech companies into a consortium, the project could never achieve the level of decentralisation and trust that exists in networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. The key learning, as he put it: if you want to build the future of finance, it has to be open. Any platform with a single architect, whether through soft power or corporate sponsorship, leads to a worse equilibrium than where you started.
But he also pushed back on the narrative that Libra was a failure. With three billion users on Facebookâs platforms, the distribution was real. And the projectâs ripple effects were enormous, it spooked central banks globally into accelerating CBDC research. Christian noted wryly that only a handful of countries have actually launched a CBDC since, while stablecoins have taken off.
Cooling Down the Stablecoin Hype
One of the most substantive parts of the conversation was Christianâs analysis of the stablecoin business model problem. Todayâs issuers like Tether and Circle look enormously profitable, but thatâs a function of high interest rates and limited competition. Once legislation like the Genius Act enforces fungibility, the principle that every regulated stablecoin should be as good as any other, the space gets commoditised. Issuers who canât control distribution will struggle, and he expects the winners to be neobanks and fintechs who use stablecoins as part of their product stack rather than standalone issuers.
He also challenged the narrative of inevitable dollar dominance through stablecoins. While dollar-denominated stablecoins dominate today, Christian argued that any stablecoin perceived as a threat to monetary sovereignty will face regulatory pushback as Libra did. He expects a sprawling ecosystem of domestic stablecoins to emerge, with peso-denominated, real-denominated, and other local currency stablecoins serving markets where borrowing in dollars makes no sense.
Universal Money Addresses: Payments as Simple as Email
The conversation turned to LightSparkâs work on Universal Money Addresses (UMAs), an open protocol built on DNS that lets users send money across different applications and institutions as easily as sending an email. Today, you canât send money between Cash App and Venmo because theyâre competing closed systems. UMA is designed to break that pattern, handling addressing, compliance, and FX quoting in an open, interoperable way.
Christian stressed that UMA is fully open source and deliberately simple. Customers including SoFi and Nubank are already implementing it, and the protocol handles travel rule compliance and KYC information exchange without centralising control, an important distinction from competitors who solve interoperability by putting themselves at the centre of every transaction.
The âUnbrokeredâ Problem
Perhaps the most powerful framing in the episode was Christianâs concept of the âunbrokered.â We talk endlessly about the unbanked, but most of the world also lacks access to any form of investment, no stocks, no money market funds, no treasury bills. As Christian described it, working and saving is normal in a country like the United States, but the vast majority of the world doesnât have those options, and the wealth gap keeps widening as a result.
This is where tokenised assets, stablecoins, and non-custodial wallets converge. The future, as Christian sees it, is allowing someone anywhere on the planet to buy a fraction of a share in a company and participate in the global financial system. Itâs not just unbanked, itâs also unbrokered. And solving both requires open, permissionless infrastructure.
Bitcoin as Transit Layer and the Spark Network
A surprising thread in the conversation was LightSparkâs use of Bitcoin, not stablecoins, as a transit layer for cross-border payments. Christian explained that Bitcoinâs deep global liquidity actually makes it more efficient than the âstablecoin sandwichâ approach where you route through a dollar stablecoin. Because youâre moving in and out of Bitcoin quickly, volatility exposure is minimal, and the SoFi customers using this for US-Mexico transfers donât even know Bitcoin is involved.
He also described the evolution from Lightning to Spark, a new protocol that scales Bitcoinâs core concepts to potentially billions of non-custodial users, something Lightningâs enterprise-grade architecture wasnât designed for. This matters enormously for financial inclusion, where non-custodial solutions may be the safest option in countries with unreliable institutions.
Redesigning Finance from Scratch
When asked what an ideal financial system would look like, Christianâs answer was characteristically principled: open permissionless networks built on credible base layer neutrality, with low fees, scalability, privacy, and a protocol for compliance. Without compliance, he argued, this never goes mainstream. But once those ingredients are in place:
âI think you have the foundation of the internet of money. Itâs an abused term, but fundamentally thatâs kind of what we need. And from there on, I think entrepreneurs all around the globe will figure out the rest.â â Christian Catalini
đïž Listen Now
The full episode is available above. Subscribe to get new episodes delivered directly to your inbox.
Additional reading:
* Why open networks win, by Christian Catalini and Robert Hackett
* Why Everyone Is Wrong About Stablecoins, By Christian Catalini
* Bitcoin Reserves Wonât Secure Americaâs FutureâOnly A Platform Play Will, By Christian Catalini
Whatâs Coming Next
This episode set the stage for the themes weâll be exploring throughout the series, the tension between open and closed in finance, the gap between stablecoin hype and business model reality, the role of competition in driving financial inclusion, and the infrastructure being built to make all of it work. We have more conversations lined up with people working at the sharp end of these questions.
Next up, we're joined by Tony McLaughlin, a 30-year veteran of payments, FX, and corporate cash management at leading financial institutions, and the originator of numerous high-profile digital currency projects. If Christian gave us the builder's perspective on open infrastructure, Tony brings the institutional lens. That conversation is one you won't want to miss.
Join the Conversation
Subscribe to get each new episode delivered to your inbox. Share this with anyone interested in the future of finance. And reply to this email with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future guests.
The future of finance is OPEN. Letâs explore it together.
â Arunjay & Ian
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com
