Mm.
The Federal Reserve will host a conference next month on payments innovation, including talks on stablecoins, tokenization, and AI and finance.
The event does take place on October 21 and we'll bring together experts to discuss the future of the payment system.
Well Fed Governor Christopher Waller says the goal is to explore new tech while keeping payments safe and efficient.
The conference will also cover the blending of traditional and decentralized finance that will be live streamed to the public.
Under the Trump administration, the Fed has taken a more open stance on crypto, including rolling back rules that once discouraged banks from issuing and using stable coins.
Well joining me this morning is Mark Boyron, CEO of Polygon Black.
Mark, great to have you here.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Well, here we are at the New York Stock Exchange, and we're talking stablecoins.
So earlier this year we had Circle go public here at the exchange, a lot of focus on stablecoins, but when you compare this to other payments and we're looking at the US or the Eurozone, including that now as well as SEPA, what do you make of stablecoin?
Yeah, I think the big idea behind this is thinking of having like internet native money, right?
We think of the money that we have today.
It interacts with the internet, but it's not native to it, and this has a lot of restrictions.
First of all, it's very localized, right?
You can't just go pay anyone globally in seconds and have it settle immediately.
You've got high costs associated with any of those types of payments that you kind of eliminate when you're actually using stablecoins.
And so those are some of the things that are, I think, breakthroughs with stablecoins that.
Don't really feel when you have like localized payment systems the way that you do in the existing system.
When you think of Fed now, that is something just in the US.
When you think of SEPA, that's something just in the European region.
Stablecoins are global and so when you can pay anyone anywhere at any time, the costs go down significantly and the efficiencies increase.
Yeah, and we're here at the center of Trad by, but at the same time there's a lot of focus on payments and we've been here.
From a lot of financial institutions as well as retail companies about their goals to possibly launch stablecoins as well.
But when it comes to regulatory clarity and the need for that in terms of scaling and innovation, what are you paying attention to as we head into the rest of 2025?
Yeah, I think the regulatory like a lack of regulatory clarity really held up stable coins for a long time, right?
We saw the Genius Act passed recently and that was a big To unlock right you go from looking at stablecoin issuers who are very concerned about the kind of regulatory climate to now suddenly every fintech looks at stablecoins as another revenue generating opportunity, and there's a lot of stablecoin issuers who will white label their stablecoins that allows for significant growth of stablecoins.
And so now that we have that regulatory clarity, I think what we see is an explosion of stablecoins based out of the US for the first time.
Rather than other regulatory regimes such as like MIA, which you know has existed for quite some time, which has been actually quite burdensome, unlike the Genius Act, which is what's going to allow for significant growth in the US of stablecoins.
Yeah, and speaking of growth, I do want to hear about growth as well as volume on your platform on Polygon when it comes to stablecoins.
So tell us what's going on.
Yeah, so we have about $3 billion of stablecoins on Polygon.
And basically just see numbers increasing straight up.
This is the case today because frankly everyone's into stablecoins, but it's also that Polygon has been building for this world for quite some time.
So when we look at like numbers already today, we see payment providers doing over $400 million of volume per month on Polygon.
We see what's really interesting is the diversity of stablecoins.
So we just had a Japanese yen based stablecoin that launched on Polygon, for example.
I think we have 16 different currencies of stablecoins on Polygon.
That gives a lot of diversity, user choice.
Obviously the US dollar ends up being the choice for many, but being able to say I want to hold the Brazilian real or you know the yen or the Mexican peso, that's something that users should be able to choose and being able to easily swap between those currencies.
So right now I think Polygon does around 30% of all non-USD stablecoin volume.
In terms of exchanges, and that's going to continue to grow as stablecoins become more in demand all around the world.
Yeah, you mentioned diversity and that yen back stablecoin.
So do you, could you send us a better understanding of what's actually happening when it comes to the economics as well as the underpinnings of other currency backed stablecoins here?
Yeah, they're not dissimilar from the US backed stablecoins, so they'll begin.
Be backed by some form of debt instrument in the background, so it's still 1 to 1 backed.
The proceeds are taken by let's say the Japanese yen kind of issuer of that stablecoin.
They're going to invest those proceeds.
They earn the revenue on those proceeds.
The holder of that stablecoin is free to use it globally in a way that I think generally the yen, for example, has been very hard to export.
Now they're able to export it much more easily globally.
The issuer is making revenue on that.
And while I have you here and while we're talking about Polygon, tell us about yield and liquidity in particular to Polygon.
Yeah, so when we think of like payments and that's really kind of a core focus of ours, one thing that we think goes hand in hand to that is some form of yield generation.
If you think of a FinTech, it's very hard to find a fintech who says I offer you payments, but I Don't offer you a way to earn yield on your assets as you're holding them.
So a core part of what we focus on at Polygon is ensuring that that yield is actually available to people as well.
We very much don't believe that one blockchain should do everything, so we actually are believers that Polygon should focus on payments and like any kind of yield bearing.
Asset should be done on another network such as something like Katana for example where they're able to offer much better yields than what a generalized blockchain can offer or a payments focused blockchain can offer.
So use FinTech can offer payments through Polygon and then very seamlessly through some of the tech that we've built, they can go ahead and offer yields through another chain such as Katana.
Yeah, and for viewers out there who might not be familiar with Katana in a nutshell, what is it?
Yeah, it's a DI centric chain, so it's really building for what users care about.
So users don't care to have one blockchain that does everything.
What they care about is I want to use this for Dei because I want to earn more yields.
And so let's build a blockchain that actually allows them to earn more yield, which is exactly what Katana does.
Yeah, and earlier in our program we mentioned what's happening with Polymarket and also the Matic migration that's happening on Polygon today.
So very quickly tell us what's happening.
Yeah, so we used to have a token called Problematic.
That was also the name of the network that's been kind of converted over to being called Pole, which is the token, and Polygon, which is the network.
But yeah, I think the most exciting part of this is Polymarket, right?
And so Polymarket, I think, is probably the biggest app in terms of mainstream applications in all of crypto.
It's built on top of Polygon.
And frankly that team has just done a phenomenal job in execution as we've seen recently, you know, they, they, they were able to acquire a team, got licensed, got a no action letter, and for the first time they're actually able to offer their prediction markets in the US to US users, which Shane, the founder has always been wanting to do and now they're able to do it.
Well, Mark, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
