Bhau Kotecha joins us now.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Paxos Labs.
Bhau, very grateful for your time on this Friday afternoon.
So you just launched Amplify.
It's a platform helping companies build and run their own stablecoins coming at a really important time.
Talk to me first and foremost, what are the key problems that you believe you are solving?
Yeah, so, you know, as you've mentioned many times on your show, more and more institutions, platforms, fintechs, exchanges are adding crypto capabilities to their platforms, and they often start with maybe some form of stablecoins or maybe some form of digital assets like Bitcoin.
Um, what our Amplify stack helps.
Customers and platforms do is actually build utility on top of that.
How do we help you brand those assets on your platform?
How do we help you generate yield on them?
How do we help you turn on borrowing, build utility around these products so they actually become a core part of your platform and not just a feature or not just a payment rail.
I got to get your take on this new exciting partnership with Toku.
At least it looks exciting from the outside.
You're bringing stablecoins into both payroll as well as the general compensation conversation, Bo.
I payroll the first real everyday use case for crypto?
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, we're seeing billions of dollars of volume of uh payroll going through Stablecoins today, right?
And I think Toku is an incredible platform and, and they're paying folks across many countries and so I, I think what's really interesting about our integration, our partnership with Toku is, hey, not only are we enabling people to get paid in stablecoins via Toku's uh platform, but now via Paxo slabs Amplify, uh, all of these, uh, people that are getting paid in.
Stablecoins on the Toku platform can immediately start earning on it, right?
So, you can imagine now how these stablecoins are becoming um a new kind of financial platform for a lot of these folks across the world and, and really kind of replacing their bank account, right?
Where they might have received payroll somewhere else in the past.
Now they're receiving it in, in uh stablecoins and immediately earning on it.
And so, it's kind of an upgraded global uh dollar account for, for anyone across the world.
Where are institutions actually using stablecoins today and what is still missing?
Yeah, so I think there's um a, a couple of camps, right?
So, you're seeing some institutions implement stablecoins as a new payment rail, right?
And so it sits alongside some of the existing payment rails they have, and they use it when it's beneficial to do so.
So I think that's one class of uh uh of customers that are doing that.
Some are putting their brand on it and building kind of specific experiences around it.
You think about someone like PayPal who has their own branded stablecoin in the market.
Um, but I think more interestingly, there's this kind of emerging class of platforms.
And FinTechs that are using stablecoins as kind of their atomic unit in their platform and they're building everything on top of that, right?
Saying the stablecoin is the primary account and then we're gonna build all the financial services we wanna offer off of that from the ground up, and that's what Paxos labs and our amplify suite helps them do.
Um, and, and so that's the really interesting, uh, kind of evolution we're seeing take place where it's people are trading stablecoins as this kind of new platform to build financial services on top of and, and we help them do that.
I, I got less than a minute left.
Quickly, if possible, what does it take for a stablecoin to actually become a quote unquote institution grade, Bo?
Oh man, uh, I, I think a lot of what you have to look at is, do you have the right backing, right?
Are you backed by the right types of assets?
Do you have a level of transparency and security that goes into those stablecoins that, um, give institutions the trust to build it, right?
And so, obviously now in the US we have a, a framework to do that.
With the Geniusville, and I think a lot of other countries are either have their own or are scrambling to put one together.
Um, I think that regulatory clarity and then, and then businesses that are able to stack up to that regulatory bar, um, are important for us to get stablecoins in the ecosystem that, um, institutions can trust and use.
Boo Techa, co-founder, CEO of Paxos Labs, really grateful for your time on this Friday.
Enjoy your weekend.
