Circle’s IPO Surge: What It Means for the Future of Crypto

The Senate passed the Genius Act, a landmark bill to regulate stablecoins.

Crypto investors are calling it a bullish signal, and stablecoins are now on the agenda at board meetings for big names in retail tech, as well as payments.

And the companies aren't just betting that stablecoins will complement money.

They're betting they'll change how it moves.

Well, joining me on this Friday morning is Sarbjet Joehal, who's the founder and CEO of Stackay.

Well, Sarjeet, happy Friday.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks so.

See you again.

Well, first and foremost, let's start out by looking at Circle, the company that went public recently here at the New York Stock Exchange, and since then we're talking not just about double digit percentage gains but even triple digits.

So that is significant.

That's huge actually.

They quadrupled within a couple of days of their IPO and it opens up the market for IPOs #1.

Number 2 is the crypto is back, you know, crypto was hard and then not hot, and I usually.

They called it a few years back.

It's a slow moving train.

It will arrive one day and it's arriving.

So few other countries in the world, they have these digital currencies like for example India has a digital currency you can pay with your digital money anywhere, but we, because of our legacy, you know, we were behind now we are catching up.

And as you know, Walmart and Amazon, they will launch, they're planning to launch their own stablecoin as well, and many others will do that too.

So it's great news for crypto. cloud crypto folks, crypto investors, and great news for fintech in general.

So I used to work at Visa, so I understand a few things about the payment side and payments, you know, global payments, it's a huge business.

There was $27 trillion done, I think, in 2024. through crypto just for doing payments so that this number this year will be much bigger.

Yeah, and Sergei, it is very important to notice that all these names and not just tech but also retail.

So Amazon as well as Meta, they're all considering stable coins here.

So what's the bigger play?

I think bigger play is the the it's all about margins, you know, like it's all about economics at the end of the day, so they will improve their margins, right?

So if they have to pay less for payment processing to some third party, so they will pass on some of those savings to the customers.

But I think most of the savings they do, they will go to the margin expansion if you will, for these retailers and ease of use plays a role as well.

So as our networks and compute improves, I mean that was the bottleneck earlier in crypto, the transaction was taking too long and the technology.

Caught up from different angles, right so yeah and I think when we're talking about use cases for stable coins, economies outside of the US may be more familiar with the use cases, but is there also a B2B use case here?

Oh yeah, definitely.

The B2B use case is huge actually.

The bigger payments are B2B payments and Um, the BDC payments are numbers like they are huge, but the average amount is is not that big, right?

But B2B sort of.

Remittance of the payments are a huge part of this whole business right and I do want to shift our focus to data breaches.

So whether we're talking about crypto or any other payments, we know that privacy as well as data security is key.

So what do you make of the latest major data breach here?

That's huge actually.

That makes me cringe.

16 billion.

Records are stolen.

That includes Apple, Facebook, Meta, which is Facebook, Facebook, and even Amazon, right, and Google.

So I mean those top players, but there are so many others like it's not only the data stolen from those.

Credentials around those platforms, but it's also your VPNs and your banking logins and all that stuff.

It's very worrisome.

It's like a wholesome sort of breach if you will, and it's shows us how vulnerable our systems are and how much work we need to do on the security side.

We need, we were talking earlier about the biometric security will become the norm at some point.

It's very like nascent right now.

Um, we will go fast or less actually, we need to, and we need other means of like logging into systems.

It was a big blatant, I think failure from somebody's part.

All these files were kept non-encrypted, you know, and somebody stole those, it's it's unthinkable like coming from the system background, it's a big.

Some big blunder somebody made.

We'll find out who did that and and absolutely so I think this is a huge blunder, but for users out there who are concerned whether we're talking about the enterprise level or the consumer level, what do you think needs to happen here, especially given the recent incident?

What needs to happen is that we need to beef up our security of our systems.

Education plays a huge role as well.

The third thing is that R&D, like from the vendors like many times.

The vendors don't put enough money on the security side, even though we have the technology to give the better security they put the security on the back burner.

So I think these are the lessons we are learning all along actually in many ways we are not fully secure, right?

So like when we step out of our home, we can get hit by a bike or we're never fully secure, but our goal is to be as much secure as we can.

So I think regulation has to catch up on this, like, hey, you need to have these things.

Like for example, we can't ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

We've got a ticket, right?

So we need that kind of mechanism for for enterprises as well.

There are fines as well as well for enterprises, but the fines are not big enough that they don't deter these things.

OK, so, well, we will have to leave it there, Bet as always, thank you so much for joining me and thank you for sharing your insights.

I appreciate it.

My pleasure.