How New Stablecoin Startup Bridge Got Acquired by Stripe for $1.1 Billion - Ep. 764
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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The fact that we were building through a period of time when no one else was building meant that by the time that there was, like, you know, excitement about the space, we were miles ahead of every of everyone else. And this building momentum and use case, which I think we helped create really, really put us in a very unique position and still does.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today. We have one from AI Schrodinger responding to Travis Kling's comments on AI agents in the crypto space. AI Schrodinger wrote on X quote, AI agents in crypto are like Schrodinger's cat alive and dead until observed whether it's a bubble or the next big thing might just depend on who's looking to have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast or leave a comment on the episode on YouTube or x. This is the January 14th
Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Excited to have you. So crypto people frequently talk about how stablecoins are superior to traditional payments, and they will say things like they're the first real application of crypto that has found product market fit. But I don't know if people are fully aware of just what the current landscape of payments looks like and why stablecoins are superior and, frankly, why Stripe felt bridge was worth an acquisition price of $1,100,000,000. So I'd love for you to walk us through a payment transaction in TradFi, and you can pick I know there's so many different types, so you could just, like, p
Yeah. That's a great way to a great way to start. So I can I can walk through 2 very different use cases of Stablecoins? So the first is cross border payment. And so someone in the US is sending someone to some money to someone in Mexico or someone in Mexico is sending money to someone in Europe. Generally, these payments happen in 2 different ways. 1, which would be the traditional consumer way in which the payments work is through what's called netting. So a company like Transferwise or Remitly or one of these other consumer applications has money in Mexico and has money in the US. And they
Yeah. You know, hearing you describe all this, it reminds me of, basically, the reason why I even went down the rabbit hole in the first place, and it'll be coming up on 10 years very shortly. Basically, I was doing this Fintech 50 list for Forbes, and I was vetting different companies in different categories, but one of the categories I had also was digital currencies. And so to learn about the rest of Fintech while I was learning about blockchain simultaneously, it was, like, so obvious. This was, like, vastly different and far superior, and the Fintech stuff was, as I put it, it was just li
Maybe just a backup. When when we started the company, we had this view that stable coins would be useful, but but we didn't know exactly how they would be useful. And once we built our APIs, the developers who've been building on top of us have showed us how they can be useful. And the I've spent a lot of time, like, my whole career has been in the Fintech space. And but it was all in the US. And Stablecoins, the problems that they solve are all international. And so, you know, I had a I had a sense of and Sean and I, when we started the company, we had a sense of what could be possible. But
But just to explain, because I think a lot of people have had the experience of going abroad and being able to use their credit cards. So why is that not an optimal solution?
So if a US consumer goes
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