The Current and Future State of Stablecoin Payments with Conduit
Kirill Gertman is the founder and CEO of Conduit, a leading B2B cross-border payments platform powered by stablecoins. Conduit leverages stablecoins to allow businesses to move money faster, cheaper and more transparently than legacy platforms such as SWIFT.
In 2024, Conduit grew transaction volumes 16x year-on-year, surpassing $10 billion in total volume.
In May 2025, Conduit raised a $36 million Series A, co-led by Dragonfly and Altos.
In this conversation, Kirill and Will Beeson discuss the true economics of stablecoin versus traditional payments, when stablecoin payments make sense, and when they don’t, how corporates use stablecoin payments alongside traditional payments in practice, what needs to change for stablecoin payments companies to win more use cases, how the stablecoin issuance market will evolve post GENIUS, and much more.
Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Kirill Gertman.
Will:
Kirill Gertman, welcome to Rebank. You're the founder and CEO of Conduit, a cross-border B2B stablecoin payments company. But I get the sense that Conduit didn’t necessarily start out focused on B2B stablecoin payments.
Tell us where this journey began for you.
Kirill:
Yeah, we definitely didn’t start in payments — not at all, actually.
When we founded the company back in early 2021, about four and a half years ago now, the idea wasn’t payments-focused. We started with the broader vision that blockchain — not just crypto, but the underlying technology — was a new and powerful toolset for building exciting applications.
And by "people," I mean not just startups, but also corporations, banks, and institutions.
The challenge we saw was that blockchain was hard to access, hard to navigate. We believed there needed to be a middle layer — something to make it easier to build on top of.
Think of Stripe on top of credit cards, or Plaid on top of open banking — we envisioned something similar for blockchain. That was the original concept when we launched in 2021.
Our first product was essentially a suite of APIs and analytics tools for developers to access DeFi protocols. And it actually worked quite well for the first 9 or 10 months of the company’s life.
But then, as I’m sure you and everyone listening will remember, in early 2022 the crypto market hit some turbulence — with events like FTX, Three Arrows Capital, Terra Luna, Genesis, Celsius, BlockFi… and probably a few more.
That market essentially disappeared overnight.
Our product itself was still functioning perfectly — we were never exposed to FTX, and we never let our customers touch assets like UST or anything similar — but demand completely vanished.
So we had to pivot. And we pivoted more than once until we eventually found real product-market fit — which is what we’re doing today: cross-border payments built on stablecoin rails, with a focus on emerging and developing markets.
Will:
When did stablecoin payments — specifically for real economy businesses — become a viable market?
At what point did it turn into a product you could actually build a business around?
Kirill:
I’d say the real shift happened in 2023 — maybe late 2022, though we weren’t quite there ourselves at that point.
The product that now forms the foundation of our business was released toward the end of 2023, around September or October. But I’d argue that the actual market for it started to emerge a bit earlier.
To expand on that, at least the way I see it, stablecoin payments didn’t begin with payments at all. The first phase of this evolution — particularly in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, and Asia — was about savings.
Individuals and businesses in these regions were using stablecoins as a hedge against local currency volatility.
If you're in Colombia, Kenya, Nigeria — or really any country where the local fiat currency is unstable or inflationary — you’re looking for a way to protect the value of your money. Whether or not people think of it in financial terms like “hedging,” that’s effectively what’s happening.
For most, the natural hedge is U.S. dollars. But in many of these markets, direct access to dollars is limited or nonexistent. So people turned to stablecoins — USDC, USDT, etc. — and started using them as savings vehicles.
This was already happening in 2021 and 2022. Individuals and businesses were effectively creating digital savings accounts using stablecoin wallets — not to speculate, not to trade, but simply to preserve value. Holding Colombian pesos or Nigerian naira for six months meant losing value. Holding USDC meant maintaining it.
That needed to happen first. As an industry, we needed that foundation before stablecoin payments could take off.
What followed was a second realization — especially among businesses. They had this digital hedge in stablecoins, which was great, but it wasn’t liquid. It didn’t help them make payments, and for businesses, that’s a problem.
For individuals, it's relatively simple. If you need to pay rent or buy groceries, you just convert your stablecoins back into local currency, hand it to your landlord or retailer, and you're good.
For businesses, it’s more complicated. They have suppliers and vendors — often in other countries — and trying to pay them using stablecoins became even more cumbersome than the traditional process.
Here's what that process looked like:
First, you had to off-ramp your stablecoins through a local exchange — say Binance or something similar. That came with withdrawal fees, processing time, and other friction.
Then, you had to take that fiat, move it to your local bank, and initiate a SWIFT transfer. That’s already painful and slow, and in this case, it's now a two-step process — making it worse than just using your bank to begin with.
That’s where we came in.
The first version of the product we launched in late 2023 allowed businesses to do both steps at once — to off-ramp and pay, directly.
So if you're a business in Brazil and you need to pay a supplier in Hong Kong, or pay Google Cloud in the U.S., we facilitate that. That’s how we started, and that’s what drove our early growth in late 2023 and into 2024 — and it continues to drive growth today.
Will:
Alright, that makes a lot of sense — and in a way, it also answers the question around the “wedge,” if I can use that term.
Naively, you might think: “Hey, stablecoin payments are more efficient than traditional fiat payments, so let’s just build a stablecoin payments platform and sell it to businesses.”
But that’s also a great way to fail as a company.
The idea of replatforming an existing payment stack — even if it’s filled with friction — is a huge ask. For all its flaws, the existing system still works, and businesses are used to it.
What I think you’re describing, instead, is identifying a real entry point through the traction that stablecoins have already gained — specifically as a kind of digital cash balance, especially in emerging markets.
And by extension, that balance starts to serve as a payment mechanism too — because people are already receiving stablecoins and now want to do more with them.
So that became the starting point.
How have things developed from there?
Kirill:
So things have developed — and they’re still developing.
We’re extremely early in this space. There’s definitely a lot of hype around stablecoins right now — as I’m sure you’ve noticed. And like many emerging technologies, I’d say stablecoins are probably overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term.
If you scroll through TechCrunch or any other specialized publication, you might think everything already runs on stablecoins — that everyone is doing it. But that’s just not the case yet.
What we’re seeing — and what we’re participating in — is a market that’s still forming. In most of the places we operate, 90% of the time we’re not replacing another stablecoin provider. We’re replacing legacy systems: local banking rails, SWIFT transfers, and other outdated infrastructure.
So yes, we’re early.
If I were to break this into stages, I’d say the first phase — which we’ve already gone through — was the accumulation and adoption of stablecoins as an asset. That had to happen first. If you don’t already have stablecoins in circulation, there’s no point building payments infrastructure around them.
Now, we’re firmly in the second phase: payments.
And within that, two major developments are taking place.
1. Shifting From “Gray Zone” to Mainstream Use Cases
This is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever built a payments platform.
In the beginning, your challenge is bootstrapping volume — going from zero to something meaningful. That’s how you get better pricing, more leverage, and build a viable business.
Almost every company in payments goes through a “gray zone” phase early on. By that I mean operating in industries that card networks and banks won’t touch — gambling, adult content, and other high-risk verticals. We’ve seen this with companies like AstroPay in LatAm, and it also happened in the early stablecoin market.
One stablecoin company, for example, built its early growth almost entirely within that niche.
At Conduit, we never played in that space. But what’s happening now is that the industry is shifting. We’re moving from those edge use cases to more mainstream applications — like import/export, e-commerce, payroll.
These are everyday business needs — large addressable markets — and we’re seeing rapid stablecoin adoption in those areas.
2. The Rise of Closed Stablecoin Ecosystems
The second thing, which is still in its infancy but gaining momentum, is the emergence of true stablecoin ecosystems.
We’re starting to see buyers and sellers who both hold stablecoins — and they can now transact directly with each other, without banks, without card networks.
This doesn’t happen often yet, but I expect we’ll see a lot more of it later this year and into 2025.
The challenge in this new phase becomes interoperability.
One party might be using USDC. Another is on USDT. Someone else has PYUSD (PayPal’s stablecoin), and another might be transacting in a euro-denominated stablecoin. How do you create a seamless way for these parties to transact with one another?
That’s where we’re going as Conduit. And I think the industry as a whole is heading that direction — toward building real stablecoin ecosystems.
But there’s a growing tendency toward walled garden approaches as well. Take Visa or Mastercard. That’s the model — a closed-loop ecosystem where all parties are within the same network.
That’s what Stripe appears to be working on with USDC and their own ecosystem, possibly even their own proprietary chain. It makes a lot of economic sense internally — you control the rails, the coin, the merchant base, the payment flow.
But the moment someone outside that system — say, a merchant using PayPal’s stablecoin — wants to transact, you run into real barriers.
So over the next year or two, we’ll see continued growth in these siloed ecosystems. But by 2026, I think the big challenge we’ll all be working to solve is how to bridge them — how to create seamless interoperability across stablecoin platforms.
Will:
Yeah. Alright — I want to come back to that last point you made, because I think it’s substantial enough to structure the second half of our conversation around.
Can you zoom in on a specific, representative example of the kind of payment you're enabling today? And maybe "payment" is too narrow a term — maybe it's better described as a customer need or workflow you're solving.
Could you start by simply describing the scenario, and then go into detail — ideally pretty deep — on all the component parts? I’d love to understand the full end-to-end flow.
Kirill:
Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of what we’re actually doing today and how it works — yes, it is payments. We're fundamentally delivering payments. There are a couple of different variations of that, but they all aim at solving the same core need. At the end of the day, what do businesses want from a payments solution? They want it to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable. That’s it. No one really cares about the underlying rails. Whether it's stablecoins, SWIFT, or something else — businesses care about results: Is it better than what they’re already using? Is it better than Wise, Airwallex, or their local bank? If the answer is yes, we win. If the answer is no, we don’t.
Let me walk you through a few real-world examples. One case is a merchant in Colombia importing goods from China or the U.S. and selling them in retail stores across Latin America. Their invoices are denominated in U.S. dollars, even though the goods are arriving by ship. These invoices are typically net 60 or net 90, so holding Colombian pesos for 90 days poses a risk — the currency may depreciate in that time. To hedge against that, these merchants convert local currency into stablecoins like USDC and hold them until payment is due. We create a wallet for them using Fireblocks, our custody partner. They on-ramp into that wallet, hold their stablecoin balance, and when the invoice is due, they upload it to our system — which we need for compliance — and we process the payout. For example, if they need to send 100,000 HKD to a supplier in Hong Kong, we work with local partners to off-ramp and settle the payment directly in Hong Kong. No SWIFT, no intermediaries, just a direct stablecoin-to-fiat transaction that is fast and cost-efficient.
Another common scenario is when a business doesn't want to hold stablecoins — they simply want to send a payment today. Take a business in Brazil that wants to pay a vendor in Europe. In that case, we partner with Zro Bank, a large FX bank in Brazil, to convert Brazilian real (BRL) into BRLx, a stablecoin pegged to the Brazilian real. That BRLx is exchanged on-chain for a euro stablecoin — there are a few, like EURC or EURt — which is then off-ramped into euros and sent to the recipient in Europe via SEPA Instant. This entire flow — from initiation in Brazil to final delivery in a European bank account — happens in about two minutes. It’s fast, secure, and fully transparent. The FX exchange happens on-chain, governed by smart contracts and algorithms, not human FX desks. That gives us consistent pricing and speed.
Now, players like Wise can do similar things. But their model relies on pre-funded liquidity pools — holding euros in one region, BRL in another, USD elsewhere. That introduces FX exposure and requires hedging, infrastructure, and operational overhead. It’s expensive to manage, and those costs get passed on to the customer. Our model avoids that. We don’t maintain pre-funded liquidity across multiple geographies. Everything settles in real time, and we only move what we need, when we need it. That gives us a lower cost basis and lets us offer better pricing to our customers.
So if you come back to the core questions — is it faster, is it cheaper, is it reliable — the answer across all three is yes. And that’s why customers choose Conduit.
Will:
Alright — maybe starting with that second example you gave.
At what point does the client actually know the cost of the payment?
Kirill:
Upfront. Otherwise, we don’t win that transaction.
If they don’t know the cost in advance, we’re simply not going to get the business. So yes — we tell them the price right away.
Will:
And you're able to price it, including the on-chain FX — the stablecoin swap — because you have visibility into available on-chain liquidity across the different stablecoins?
Kirill:
Essentially, yes. Whenever a customer uses our system — whether through our web UI or our API, it doesn’t really matter, it's the same infrastructure — when they request a quote, they see the exact amount upfront.
That amount is inclusive of our costs, and, when applicable, inclusive of local taxes. For example, in Brazil, there’s IOF; other countries have their own specific taxes. All of that is baked into the quote. The customer knows exactly what the cost will be before they initiate the transaction.
Of course, because it involves FX, that quote can’t hold forever. So every quote comes with an expiration — in this example, I believe it’s 170 seconds. After that, it automatically refreshes and a new quote is generated, showing updated pricing.
Now, the reason we’re able to price things this way and bundle everything in — including the on-chain FX — is because we control the full stack.
We know the local costs and taxes in advance, obviously. But beyond that, we also manage the spot pricing and the on-chain FX component ourselves. We run our own liquidity pools, specifically designed for stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps.
That’s important: we don’t support Bitcoin, Ether, or any other crypto assets. We’ve engineered a purpose-built system optimized exclusively for stablecoin transactions — and because it’s ours, we have full visibility and control.
So, yes — it’s fast, it’s cost-efficient, and we have a high level of confidence in the pricing we deliver. That’s how we’re able to give our customers firm quotes upfront, and why we’re able to move as quickly as we do.
Will:
So you're funding the liquidity pools yourself — or are you also incentivizing the market to provide that liquidity?
Kirill:
It’s a mix. We can do both.
That said, these aren’t fully open pools. Because we work with banks and licensed financial institutions, there’s a compliance layer that sits on top of everything.
So it’s not like Uniswap, where anyone can just connect a wallet, add liquidity, and walk away — no KYC, no KYB, no oversight. Our model is different.
We need to know the parties involved, we need to verify them, and everything must comply with regulatory standards.
That said, yes — we can provide liquidity ourselves, or we can partner with banks or select liquidity providers who operate within a controlled and compliant framework.
Will:
Okay — and in that Brazil-to-Europe example you mentioned, I’m not intimately familiar with Brazilian payment systems, but I do know there’s been a lot of innovation there in recent years.
Europe, of course, has SEPA Instant, and the UK has Faster Payments — both of which, I imagine, make on- and off-ramps virtually instant, often just a matter of seconds.
To what extent is the speed of the flow you described dependent on the local payment rails in each country?
Kirill:
Oh — very much so. That’s actually why I like the Brazil-to-Europe example. Obviously I’m a little biased, but it really highlights how powerful this setup can be when the local rails are strong on both ends.
As you mentioned, in Europe you have SEPA Instant, which allows for near-instant payments — though it’s important to note that applies to transfers under €100,000. If it’s over that threshold, it might take a few hours or, depending on the time of day, settle the next business day.
In Brazil, you have Pix, which I think you were referring to earlier. Pix is a domestic, real-time payment rail — 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s fast, seamless, and incredibly effective within Brazil. You can’t use it for international payments, but domestically, it works brilliantly.
So yes, when you have instant on-ramp and instant off-ramp on both sides, with a stablecoin “sandwiched” in between, it works really well. It’s incredibly fast and efficient.
On the flip side, when those domestic rails aren’t fast, you run into friction. Take the U.S., for example — the domestic payment system is notoriously slow. Sure, there’s FedNow and RTP, but adoption is still lagging. Most people are still using ACH, which can take two to three days to settle. There’s also Fedwire, which is faster, but it’s not universally used.
If you need to on-ramp or off-ramp via ACH and wait two days for the funds to move, that negates much of the advantage of using stablecoins in the middle. It’s a poor experience overall.
And actually — maybe I’m going off on a bit of a tangent — but this is why I’m not a huge believer in domestic stablecoin payment use cases, at least not in countries with strong domestic payment systems. Brazil, Mexico, India, Spain — all of these have excellent local rails.
In those cases, stablecoins may still make sense for dollar access, but not necessarily for local payments. The native systems like Pix, UPI (in India), or SPEI (in Mexico) already solve those problems really well.
The inverse is also true: in places like the U.S., where local payment systems are outdated, stablecoins can be helpful in theory — but then you run into friction on the on- and off-ramps again. For example, if I’m in Boston sending stablecoins to someone in Los Angeles, but we both need days to on- and off-ramp, that’s not an improvement.
Where this really works — and works best — is in cross-border corridors where both ends have fast, modern domestic payment rails, but no good way to connect internationally.
That’s the gap we’re filling. These domestic systems are excellent — fast, modern, efficient — but they’re closed loops. They don’t speak to each other across borders.
What we’re doing at Conduit is connecting those otherwise disconnected systems using a single, blockchain-based settlement layer — stablecoins. That’s where the real magic is happening.
Will:
I imagine that for most of your scaled clients — and there may be exceptions — but particularly for those with existing businesses and established payments operations, they’re running parallel payment systems internally.
What does that setup generally look like?
Say we’re talking about a business with $50 to $100 million in annual turnover — how are they typically managing their payment infrastructure? And how would they begin integrating cross-border stablecoin payments, through a service like yours, into that existing stack?
Kirill:
Yeah, that’s a big question — and one we’re thinking about every day.
There are a number of layers to this, but fundamentally, yes — any medium to large business, especially those with a global footprint, will be using multiple payment rails. They’ll have a mix of banking relationships and PSPs. For example, some of the businesses we work with use JPMorgan or Citi for their core banking, and providers like Worldpay or Euronet for PSP functions.
These companies are large enough to have a dedicated treasury management team, and those teams make decisions the same way anyone else would — based on speed, cost, and reliability. That’s the evaluation framework.
Our entry point is to make integration as frictionless as possible. So if a company is already using JPMorgan, for example, we’re not trying to displace their entire payments infrastructure. Instead, we ask:
- Where are you sending money?
- Where are you receiving money?
- Which corridors are underperforming in terms of cost or speed?
We’ll show them where we can deliver faster, cheaper, and more reliable service — and let that speak for itself.
We also make integration dead simple. If you’re already banking with JPMorgan, you can just send us a book transfer from your existing account to our JPM account. From there, we handle the rest — converting to stablecoins, moving funds cross-border, off-ramping where necessary.
So you’re not reinventing the wheel — you’re just plugging into a better rail for specific corridors. We adapt to your current setup.
That’s not unique to us — any company that wants to win in this space should aim to be as low-friction as possible. But we take it even further. A big part of our roadmap is to integrate directly into ERP systems like NetSuite, or treasury management platforms like Modern Treasury. These are the systems of record these finance teams are already using, and we want to be a native option within those environments — just another dropdown menu for sending payments through Conduit when it makes the most sense.
And what we’re consistently seeing is that the more exotic or difficult the corridor, the more we shine. For example, one client is based in Japan and doing business in Africa. Sending money to places like Nigeria in naira, or dealing in Kenyan shillings, is a logistical nightmare through traditional banks. Even major institutions struggle to serve those corridors efficiently. That’s where we come in — not by forcing them to switch their entire system, but by solving a very real pain point more effectively than their current providers.
Another layer to this is who the payment is for. Is it a supplier? An employee? A customer?
For instance, if you’re sending payroll from the U.S. to Argentina, a lot of contractors and employees actually want to receive USDC in their wallets. But as a U.S.-based employer, you may not want to deal with crypto directly.
So we make it simple: continue using ACH or Fedwire just like you do today. We’ll give you a different account number, sweep the funds, convert to stablecoins, and deliver it to your employee’s wallet — no change to your payroll process.
On the flip side, if you’re running a marketplace or e-commerce platform, and you’re collecting payments from users in, say, Chile, you’ll find a lot of people already using stablecoins. So we let them check out with a stablecoin, and then we convert and remit to you in domestic USD, the same way you already operate.
So yes — we’re trying to make things better. But just as importantly, we’re trying to make the transition as seamless as possible. We don’t ask companies to overhaul their operations. We just plug into what they’re already doing and quietly make it faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
Will:
Yeah, yeah.
So it sounds like where you're, quote-unquote, winning versus traditional offerings is primarily in the more exotic currency pairs — or in specific corridors, in and out of certain countries — as well as in particular payment types. You mentioned contractors in Argentina preferring to be paid in stablecoins.
What are some of the other — I won’t call them low-hanging fruit — but let's say early-win scenarios?
How do you expand the range of instances where you can win? And what needs to happen for that broader universe of use cases to really open up?
Kirill:
Yeah, this is a really interesting topic — and definitely something I spend a lot of time thinking about. As you’d expect, my job is to figure out how to grow our business, and this question gets right to the heart of that.
You're absolutely right in your framing. Where stablecoins are winning today — not just for us at Conduit, but across the entire industry — is in more exotic currency corridors, underserved countries, and specific use cases like contractor payments. That’s where we’re seeing real traction. But the broader question is: How do we expand beyond those initial use cases?
There are a few developments happening that I think will shape that future. One of the most significant is the U.S. Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act — the so-called “Genius Act.” I'm not going to pretend to be the foremost expert on it, but I do think it's already reshaping how financial institutions approach stablecoins.
One common misunderstanding I hear is that banks are now going to start issuing stablecoins. But that’s not quite accurate. Under the current framing of the legislation, banks that issue a stablecoin would be required to hold 100% reserves — no fractional lending. And that’s a huge disincentive for traditional banks. Stablecoins become less profitable than traditional deposits.
What’s more likely is the rise of deposit tokens — tokenized representations of bank deposits. We’re already seeing moves in that direction. JPMorgan launched its own token. Citi mentioned something similar on a recent earnings call. The key difference with deposit tokens is that banks can continue fractionalizing the underlying deposits, unlike with fully reserved stablecoins. So economically, it makes more sense for them.
Now, here's where it gets interesting — and complicated. We’re going to end up with a fractured ecosystem. You'll have Citi Coin, JPM Coin, Stripe's USDB, PayPal’s PYUSD, and eventually Alibaba Coin, Amazon Coin, and others. Some will be stablecoins, others deposit tokens, and some may even be tokenized money market funds.
From a market expansion perspective, that’s exciting. It opens the door for new payment methods across e-commerce, payroll, investments, remittances — you name it. You could imagine a future where you pay for your Amazon order in Amazon Coin, receive money from a friend in PayPal Coin, and hold savings in a tokenized money market fund.
But this fragmentation also creates real challenges. What happens when you get paid in PYUSD but need to pay Amazon in Amazon Coin — while your own funds are sitting in a tokenized Citi deposit?
That’s where I think Conduit’s opportunity lies.
The space is becoming vertically integrated — every major player is issuing their own coin and trying to own the full stack: Circle with USDC, Tether with USDT, Stripe with USDB, and so on. But what we’re lacking — and what we believe needs to exist — is a horizontal infrastructure layer that connects them all.
Think of it as a settlement and interoperability layer, a sort of clearinghouse for digital value. Just like ACH helped settle across banks, we need an equivalent for the tokenized financial world — where users don’t have to think about how to convert one token into another just to complete a transaction.
That’s where we see Conduit playing a key role:
- Seamlessly converting between token types
- Supporting cross-border and cross-platform movement of value
- Making it possible for businesses and individuals to transact without caring which rail or token they’re using
And doing all of this at scale, across multiple countries, jurisdictions, and financial systems.
So to answer your original question — what needs to happen to expand the universe of stablecoin use cases? It’s this. It’s interoperability. Once we solve that, we go from niche corridors and specialized use cases to mainstream adoption across industries and borders.
Will:
No, I mean — I’ve thought about this too, and I’m with you. It seems like the natural end state is a world with a huge number of different stablecoins.
There’s at least some perceived economic incentive for issuing a stablecoin, and really, there’s no obvious reason not to — especially if there’s even modest upside. So in theory, everyone could end up doing it.
But that leads us to a future that feels... pretty suboptimal. Imagine dozens — even hundreds — of digital equivalents to the dollar, or to the euro. That doesn’t seem like a good outcome.
Even with standardization efforts like Genius in the U.S. or MiCA in Europe, each of these stablecoins still carries a different risk profile. And while you could make an academic argument that a dollar deposited with Citi is equal to a dollar held at Silicon Valley Bank — especially within insured deposit frameworks — I don’t think that logic holds for stablecoins.
Sure, in the traditional banking system, you can say a “Citi dollar” and an “SVB dollar” are effectively the same because of FDIC insurance and the political will to protect the system — as we’ve seen with regional bank backstops in the U.S. But that assumption doesn't extend naturally to the stablecoin world, at least not as things stand today — even post-Genius.
And even in the scenario you mentioned — where Conduit or another player becomes a sort of clearinghouse or exchange for different versions of USD or EUR stablecoins — the question becomes: Are these stablecoins truly one-to-one interchangeable?
You could argue yes, as long as the mint-and-redeem process at the issuer level guarantees parity. But if that ever breaks — even slightly — the whole premise collapses.
Because the moment these tokens are not perfectly fungible, you’ve undermined one of the core value props of stablecoins: simplicity and universal liquidity. If you’re running an exchange between "Stripe USD" and "PayPal USD" and suddenly one is trading at 0.998 and the other at 1.001 — everything breaks down.
It’s no longer a seamless, dollar-equivalent ecosystem. It becomes fragmented, unstable, and hard to navigate.
I’m curious how you think about that. How do you approach the risk of these systems diverging in value — and what does it mean for stablecoin interoperability and the broader viability of this multi-issuer future?
Kirill:
Yeah — there’s a lot of really interesting stuff in what you said, and definitely a lot to unpack.
First of all, I think you're absolutely right. This is one of those situations where there’s a kind of local optimum — it makes economic sense, at the company level, for a player like Stripe, Amazon, or Alibaba to issue their own stablecoin.
The cost is low. The barriers to entry are low. The incentives — at least in a self-contained system — are clear. So from a local perspective, it works really well.
But the issue, as you pointed out, is that this leads to a kind of global misalignment.
Everyone pursuing what’s optimal for them individually creates fragmentation at the system-wide level. It works brilliantly for one ecosystem — but not so well across ecosystems.
There’s actually an imperfect but useful analogy here: In the U.S., in the early 1800s, banks used to issue their own dollars. A bank in Kentucky might issue one version, a bank in Massachusetts another, and Florida yet another. These were all technically “dollars,” but they were locally issued and independently managed.
Most people don’t know this, but that’s how it worked for a while — and it led to a lot of confusion and inefficiency in the broader economy.
Eventually, that fragmentation is what led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System — to standardize and stabilize the issuance of money across regions. And even today, the regional structure of the Fed — with branches in places like Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco — is a holdover from that era.
The original idea was that each regional Fed would collect and reconcile the different local bank notes within its jurisdiction. Then, the various Feds would settle with each other, creating a kind of clearinghouse across the country.
And fun historical fact — when the Fed system was being designed, one of the requirements was that each regional Federal Reserve branch had to be located within a three-day horse ride from its member banks. That’s how they ensured practical settlement across regions.
It’s a funny detail, but I think the analogy holds in a modern context. What we’re seeing with stablecoins now is history rhyming — everyone issuing their own version of a digital dollar, in isolated silos. It works locally, but it doesn’t work systemically. And eventually, just like in the 1800s, we’ll need infrastructure — a modern equivalent to the Fed or a clearinghouse — to make these systems interoperable.
That’s the challenge. And I think that’s the opportunity.
Will:
Oh — so that’s where the original ACH settlement times come from?
Kirill:
Exactly. That’s where it comes from.
It’s a fun little historical quirk, but my broader point is that we’ve had precedents like this before — where the system was fragmented and eventually a centralized or quasi-governmental clearing structure had to emerge to manage it all.
That’s what happened with the early U.S. banking system and the creation of the Federal Reserve. And I think we may see something similar in the stablecoin space. It might not look the same, but the need for some form of interoperability and standardization feels inevitable.
At least in the short term, though, you’re absolutely right — a GENIUS-compliant stablecoin in the U.S. is not the same as a MiCA-compliant stablecoin in Europe. The reserve structures are different. And there are even more formats coming, which makes things even more complex.
Take something like USDC or USDT — on the surface, they’re pegged one-to-one to the dollar. But the real-world dynamics are different.
Especially in the case of USDT — Tether doesn’t actually redeem at a one-to-one rate in practice. There’s usually a fee — 10 basis points or more — and when you go to actually redeem it, you’re not always getting back exactly $1 per token.
So yes, on-chain, these stablecoins may be treated as equivalent — but when it comes to off-chain redemption, that parity breaks down.
If you’re trading large amounts of USDT, you’ll almost always see small discrepancies — maybe it’s trading at 0.9999 instead of 1.0000 — but it’s not truly fungible at par.
That’s why internally at Conduit, we actually treat USDT as a volatile asset. We don't assume a one-to-one exchange rate with dollars when we’re handling it. We treat it more like a currency with price risk, because that’s what it is in practice.
Will:
So you treat USDC differently?
Kirill:
We do.
With Circle, there’s more flexibility — more transparency — so we do treat USDC as one-to-one. That’s the key distinction, and it really illustrates your point.
We’ve had to build a system that handles these differences — just like you would for traditional FX. If you’re managing EUR/USD, you account for minor spreads. Same idea here, just on a much smaller scale.
There’s always a tiny bit of FX between USDT and USD — maybe half a basis point, maybe a full bip — but it exists. So even among dollar stablecoins, there’s effectively an FX layer.
And as you pointed out earlier, this is going to persist. Amazon Coin might not equal Citi Coin. Alibaba Coin might not equal Stripe’s USDB. You’re going to see little spreads, and you’ll need to account for them — just like we do.
Now, ideally, those spreads are offset by savings elsewhere. For example, if you're using Amazon Coin instead of a credit card, you're avoiding interchange fees, which might be 2%–3%. And the conversion spread might be just 0.02%. So net-net, you’re still ahead.
But yes — the short answer is: it’s going to be tricky to navigate. And people aren’t used to that yet. Right now, most people think “a dollar is a dollar.”
But in reality, even today, people are paying spreads — they just don’t always see them. Take card payments. There's often a 3% fee built in. Someone is absorbing that — the merchant, the customer, or both. The same thing will happen here.
There will be discrepancies between stablecoins, and someone will have to eat that cost — either the merchant, the platform, or the end user. How that plays out will be part of the next chapter in this evolution.
Will:
Do you have direct mint-and-burn relationships with most of the stablecoins you interact with?
Kirill:
Absolutely.
That’s something we see as really important — you have to go straight to the source, if you will. It’s essential for control, reliability, and efficiency.
Will:
Right. And maybe this is a good topic to wrap on.
One of the broader implications of having so many different stablecoins in circulation is that it’s hard to envision a future where thousands — or even tens of thousands — of stablecoins are circulating, and consumers are actively choosing between them, swapping in and out with intention and awareness.
That kind of future doesn’t feel realistic.
So to me, that suggests that stablecoins — or at least many of their differences — get abstracted away from the end user. And if that’s the case, it naturally raises another question:
If the user no longer sees or chooses the specific stablecoin, what’s the value of issuing a branded stablecoin? Especially if brand visibility is a major part of the perceived upside today?
Of course, the economics of issuing a stablecoin may still hold — things like cost reduction, float, and transaction fees — but the brand value might fade if everything’s hidden behind layers of abstraction.
How do you think about that?
And maybe even more broadly — if we think about the stablecoin value chain in a world where there are dozens or hundreds of issuers, you could argue that the real value capture happens closer to the end user. A company like Stripe, for example, can vertically integrate — not just issue a stablecoin, but build the rails, the merchant network, the payment stack.
In that scenario, every successive layer on top of issuance becomes a margin opportunity. The further you move up the stack — toward the end user — the more of the value chain you can collapse and own.
How do you see that playing out?
Kirill:
Yeah — maybe starting with the point about brand value, because I think that's a good framing.
Today, we do have a few strong brands in stablecoins. USDC, USDT — people know those names. And in many ways, these brands act as moats. For Tether, it’s a moat. For Circle, it’s a moat. They’ve built trust and distribution over time.
But I think that brand value will erode over time — not disappear entirely, but diminish.
From my perspective — and I say this as someone who’s agnostic — we work with any stablecoin issuer we believe to be reliable and trustworthy. So if the brand fades into the background, that’s fine with me. But if I were Circle or Tether, I’d probably be thinking hard about how to protect that moat.
To your point: for stablecoins to truly reach mainstream adoption, they’ll have to become invisible — just like TCP/IP is to the internet, or ACH is to the average consumer.
At that point, brand doesn’t matter. The stablecoin becomes a rail — infrastructure. And as the founder of Conduit, I’m perfectly fine with that. In fact, that’s our whole goal. We want to be the connective layer, the invisible settlement network that makes all of this work — regardless of which stablecoin is being used.
All the hard stuff — whether it’s interoperability, spread management, redemption differences — we handle that behind the scenes. The end customer doesn’t care about which stablecoin is being used. They care about three things:
- Is it faster?
- Is it cheaper?
- Is it reliable?
That’s the job.
Now, in terms of the vertical players, I think there’s going to be a phase — and we’re already in it — where everyone tries to do everything.
Circle is doing issuance, but they’ve also launched a payment network — CPN — which we’re a part of. Stripe already is a payment network, and now they’re getting into issuance. PayPal has a stablecoin. Everyone's moving up and down the stack, trying to own more margin and more customer relationship.
But longer term, I think it all settles into something more like what we see with card networks today. Visa, Mastercard — yes, there are technical differences, but to the average user, they’re interchangeable. You might use one for travel rewards and the other for a cashback benefit, but functionally, they do the same thing.
I think that’s where we’re headed with stablecoins. There will still be differences — distribution tie-ins and loyalty-based adoption. Starbucks, for example, already acts like a fintech — they have huge prepaid balances. If they tokenize that into a “Starbucks Coin,” sure, it’ll have some stickiness. You’ll use it because you buy a lot of coffee.
But that’s not going to drive deep technical differentiation. The benefits will be marginal — it’s more about distribution and brand integration, not functionality.
So yes, the space becomes commoditized at the infrastructure layer, and distribution wins at the top. And for us at Conduit, that’s exactly where we want to sit — in the middle layer, under the hood, enabling everything to connect.
Our job is to make sure that any token — whether it's Spotify Coin, Stripe USD, PayPal PYUSD, or whatever else — can move through the system, interoperate with other tokens, and connect to fiat on both ends.
So while brand will still matter — especially in consumer-facing contexts — it won’t be about the stablecoin brand itself. It’ll be about the platform brand tied to the use case: Spotify, Starbucks, Amazon.
And we’ll be in the background, making sure it all just works.
Will:
Speaking of branding — I think your company name is incredible.
Kirill:
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
Will:
It’s just interesting, because it seems like it captured the original vision of the business when you first started… but now, it actually fits even better with what you’re building today.
Kirill:
No, that’s right. I won’t pretend I was too smart about it — honestly, it’s almost a coincidence.
But from the beginning, the idea behind the name was: How do you connect people to better technology that’s hard to access? That was the concept then, and it still works.
Lucky for us, the name still fits — even today. It’s the same core idea we’re building toward.
Will:
Amazing. Well, Kirill, thank you so much for your time. This was an incredible conversation.
Kirill:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me — I really enjoyed it.
Will:
Kirill Gertman, thank you very much for joining us today.