A battle unfolding in Washington and on Wall Street over the future of money.
The lard act remains stalled in Congress and stable coins continue to see regulatory progress this week.
The latest FDIC rulemaking moves a stable coins from a regulatory gray area into a structured bank-like framework and the White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report which effectively threw its weight behind stable coin rewards.
Countering long held fears from the banking lobby while stable coins differ from tokenized deposits, tokenized deposits are the banking industry's defensive response to stable coins.
They represent your actual bank balance but recorded on a blockchain ledger.
Well joining me this morning at the New York Stock Exchange is Alex Gluchowski, co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. now Matter Labs is the developer of the case.
Well, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining. to be here.
Well, as 2026 gets underway, all eyes are on what's happening on the regulatory front, but for the lead person out there, can you walk us through the actual difference between a stable coin and a tokenized bank deposit?
Absolutely.
So the technologically they are both underlying the same basic technology product.
It's both tokenized assets that can use all the benefits.
Blockchains.
The difference is more in how they are treated from a legal perspective.
Stablecoins are bearing instruments.
Tokenized deposits are actual representation of your deposit at a bank, and so they are treated the same way.
You have FDIC insurance.
They are staying within the perimeter of the bank and the bank can use the deposit funds to fund to actually execute their banking activity.
So from the banking perspective it's actually the same thing, just a higher utility on the side of velocity and efficiency of operations.
And you and I are here at the New York Stock Exchange and when we're talking about what's happening between Trafi and D5, your take on privacy, especially privacy technology where we stand right now.
Privacy is a critical blocker for traditional institutions to go on chain, whereas the crypto world has not cared that much that deeply about privacy for the last years, maybe. pseudonymity on the chain will be sufficient.
This is absolutely not acceptable for banks.
This is absolutely not acceptable for real businesses that move real operations on the tokenized rails.
They have to observe their regulations in different jurisdictions and they also have business interests and they cannot just disclose all of their flows to their competitors, to the entire world.
And this is why.
Blockchains with privacy is really the enabler that has permitted the banks now to move into this space.
This is something that we're building with zero Knowledge proofs, which is this amazing new breakthrough technology that gives you the benefits of privacy and security of public blockchains and connectivity of public blockchains for the first time.
And in a nutshell, you also announced a partnership with Bitco so tell us what's happening and in a nutshell, can you explain the infrastructure?
Absolutely.
So the big goal partnership enables banks to have a full stack solution out of one hand, essentially we partner with these institutions to give them the tokenization platform, the blockchain.
Infrastructure with privacy and connectivity to others in public and private chains and now also the regulated custody with Bido as a public company.
They have a lot of experience and one of the most highly regarded secure platforms for tokenized custody and now these institutions have everything they need in one go.
And finally, before I let you go, there is no single magic bullet for privacy, but give us your take on what needs to happen and of course the timeline for you and Bitco.
So this privacy technology that we're building called Previdium is available now and we see institutions are moving into the space.
I was just two weeks ago at the DC Blockchain summit in Washington where we announced the partnership with the carrier network building on Previdium.
This is A network of 5 regional US banks founded by the former chair of the OCC, so you can see the level of trust that these institutions and regulators are now having in these technologies.
It's available now.
It's moving from experiments into real production and real real deployments this year.
Well Alex, it was great having you on the show today.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for laying all of it out for us.
Thank you.
