Rebuilding Cross-Border Payments with Prabhakar Reddy of OpenFX
The problem with cross-border money movement is not at the stablecoin layer. It's purely the FX layer, because most of the infrastructure that's been built was built as a wrapper around banks, and banks are in the business of holding money, not moving money.
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Prabhakar Reddy is the Founder and CEO of OpenFX, which he started in 2024 to rebuild the foreign exchange layer of cross-border payments. The company runs its own FX market-making desk underneath a single API for collecting, banking, converting and paying out money, and moves roughly $50 billion a year with about 100 people.
OpenFX is Prabhakar's fifth company in twenty years as a founder. Before OpenFX, he co-founded FalconX and spent a period investing at Accel.
Despite enthusiasm about stablecoin payments, the part of the stack that bypasses Swift, Prabhakar believes the costs actually sit one layer down. The FX market is opaque by design, with even the best fintech services built as wrappers around institutions whose revenue comes from holding deposits rather than moving them.
Please enjoy the following insights from Prabhakar Reddy of OpenFX.
Building Robinhood plus Citadel for FX
Prabhakar sees two ways to build an FX desk: create a wrapper around banks and OTC desks that already exist, which is what every previous company did, or build the trading desk underneath your infrastructure, too. Effectively, Robinhood on top and Citadel Securities underneath, for FX.
With experience as Co-Founder of FalconX, Prabhakar and OpenFX are choosing the latter.
🎬 Watch: Building Robinhood plus Citadel for FX
https://youtube.com/shorts/jCrtqzQ2Th0
What It Takes to Move $50 Billion a Year
In a completely inefficient world, you need a trillion dollars of capital to trade a trillion of notional. Efficiency comes from capital rotation. With OpenFX's stated goal of FX payouts in less than an hour, efficiency is crucial. The details of the math as laid out by Prabhakar make all the difference.
🎬 Watch: What It Takes to Move $50 Billion a Year
https://youtube.com/shorts/iJv-rx19sjI
Egregious Spreads on a Pegged Currency
The UAE dirham is pegged to the dollar, so there is no currency risk to price. Yet, spreads in that market were still running at 40 to 50 basis points before OpenFX entered, Prabhakar says. Now, they are under five.
He describes the same pattern everywhere: incumbents cut prices by half within weeks of an OpenFX announcement, and everyone remains profitable at the lower spreads, highlighting the excessive margin in most FX markets.
🎬 Watch: Egregious Spreads on a Pegged Currency
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TOe-CnSv24c
A Million Payments a Second
Prabhakar believes that AI agents break the assumptions cross-border payments were built on. The system today is designed for two transactions of a million dollars each at the end of the day. In a decade, he expects a million agentic transactions of two dollars each per second, settling on a Saturday at 3AM.
🎬 Watch: A Million Payments a Second
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ile857HYeLo
🎬 Watch the Full Episode
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