Exploring DeFi and Stablecoin Innovations at Money2020 Europe

A stablecoin bill could hit the Senate floor this week with enough support to move on to the House.

The Genius Act aims to regulate stablecoins nationwide in the US and cleared a procedural vote on May 19th.

Now crypto lobbying groups saying they're ready to help lawmakers keep up the momentum and get the bill across the finish line.

Well joining me from Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam.

This morning, where plenty of announcements are happening from partnership to acquisitions is George Christopher Investor at Coin.

Good afternoon to you, George, over in Amsterdam.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Well, first and foremost, stablecoins undeniably a hot topic at the moment on both sides of the Atlantic.

So where do you envision the landscape for payments and where do you see the most opportunity for stablecoins moving forward?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Great question and really excited about the stablecoin opportunity.

At Coin Fund, we see a lot of opportunity in cross-border B2B payments, especially cross border because that's where a lot of the pain points exist today.

Payments within countries actually work pretty well today, but when you're trying to communicate between distant systems and between corresponding banks, that's when you run into problems and stablecoins have the opportunity and provide the ability to alleviate some of those pain points.

And of course major fintech names are incorporated stablecoins in their business strategy.

So what do you think Fintech incumbents should be considering when it comes to crypto?

Yeah, it's great to see incumbents start to adopt the technology.

For a long time, those that have operated in this space believe that blockchains could bring efficiency, and now incumbents are seeing those efficiencies realized in real time with payments and with high scale, high throughput blockchains like all the L2s on Ethereum or Salana.

You're able to send stablecoins to any wallet across the world in a matter of seconds for cents, which is really exciting.

And existing incumbents are using that for everything for cross border payments, for companies to pay their suppliers for payroll and many other use cases.

So it's great to see that some of the advantages of blockchains are being realized by incumbents in the space.

And George, I do want to ask you about the regulatory outlook, both states side as well as overseas, but first and foremost, starting out with the US, what is your take on how the regulatory shift under Trump has impacted the industry so far?

Yeah, it's been a big shift, and I think the biggest shift has just been that there's laws being passed and being put into place that give entrepreneurs and builders in the space the room to operate and also give them the ability to understand what the regulations are going to be so they can build to have a compliant product in mind and said under, you know, prior administrations, a lot of founders and builders were left guessing.

So that sort of clarity will really help builders and entrepreneurs in the space build out their companies, build out their plans for the future, so they can build companies that will sustain not only in this regulatory regime but in future ones as well.

Yeah, and George, you're joining us from Amsterdam at the Money 2020 Europe gathering, so give us a sense of some of the conversations that are taking place right now over on the other side of the Atlantic.

Yeah, Money 2020 is still very much a traditional conference, but it's really encouraging to see the amount of conversations that are happening not only around stablecoins and payments, but around topics such as DI as well.

So while it's still a very traditional conference with a lot of topics that have been touched on in prior years, people seem to be very excited about stablecoins.

Stablecoin enabled payments, and DeFi not only within the crypto industry but outside the crypto industry as well.

And finally, George, we have about 60 seconds here, but what is next on the horizon when it comes to the world of crypto and web 3.

Yeah, I would love to see continued adoption and continued use cases that are used not only by, you know, those crypto natives but those outside of crypto.

One thing in payments that we're really excited about is the ability of those to implement stablecoin swapping infrastructure.

We think that's a real important next step. as stablecoins continue to proliferate not only US denominated stablecoins, but stablecoins that aren't denominated in USD, and once we see more and more of those stablecoins come unchained, people are going to want to swap in and out of their own stablecoin with stablecoins that are denominated in different currencies to facilitate payments, trade, and other use cases.

OK, George, well, thank you so much for joining us during your busy time at Money 2020 Europe.

I appreciate your insights as well as your perspective.

Thank you for the time.

Thanks for having me.