The Stablecoin Chain Wars: Codex’s Bet on On-Chain FX | Cofounder Haonan Li
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Most cross border transactions involve an FX component. And so if you are the cheapest place for FX to happen, that chain will be a natural magnet for all these stablecoin flows. And we wanna be the cheapest place for t to c swaps. You want to be the cheapest place, fastest place to do this fiat stable swaps as well. This is not what typically happens at a chain company. A chain company classically doesn't want to think about fiat. Why would you think about fiat? I'm I'm at a crypto company. Why would I think about fiat? If you think about the reality of these systems, like, do you make it so
Bankless Nation. I'm with Hounan, the cofounder and CEO of Codex. Codex is a stablecoin focused layer two on top of Ethereum. Hounan, welcome to Bankless.
Hey, David. Good to see you.
So you are working in a pretty competitive part of the market. There's Stripes Tempo. There's Circles Arc. There's Plasma. There's Stable. Not to mention the deep incumbent Tron. Competitive. Are you intimidated?
You know, I I think there's a ton of competition if you think about it from the perspective of a VC PowerPoint slide. Right? If you had a category that said stablecoin chain, you would have all these logos. I think what that abstracts away is actually most of the reality and the detail underneath. And the reality is that these different chains are pursuing totally different directions. And I can just say for us, I can't speak for others, when we are going to market against our customers, we don't really hear about any of these other chains. We don't hear about Plasma and Stable because they've
Maybe you could teach me and the listeners a little bit about what makes these chains so different from each other. Because, like, if you I think you talk to the average person in crypto, they're like, oh, yes. There's just this whole payment chain sector where we're all trying to disrupt Visa. And we're gonna put the stablecoins on the very fast blockchain, and that's going to become the the payments chain. And that's what all of these all the the chains that I just named, that's what they're all going after. Again, Tempo, Arc, Plasma Stable, Tron has been the payments chain, the stablecoin p
Yeah. I think there's multiple layers to it, and there are a lot of differences across multiple layers. I think let me start with saying that it's such a new category that nobody really knows what they are doing quite yet. Right? They're all exploring this idea maze, this giant design space, and people have chosen different parts of the maze to start with. So, you know, what is the approach of, say, a plasma or perhaps a stable? Right? The approach is the bearishain playbook. So what is the bearishain playbook? Right? You do you do a token event, and you attract a bunch of flows that come onto
Mhmm. Actually means great. Come off like that. Yeah.
It it comes off like that. Right? It's it's almost like the word deluxe. It just means good to a lot of people. Like, deluxe cheeseburger is just a good cheeseburger. Right? But neutrality means something. What does it mean here? It means if you are a competing fintech from Stripe, do you really wanna bet the future of your business on Stripe Chain? Mhmm. If you are a competing issuer to Circle, do you really wanna bet the future of your business on Circle Chain? It's hard for me to imagine. Like, imagine the sort of CEO of a large fintech going to his board and saying, hey, guys. Like, we rea
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