The Future of Global Money Movement

Now live from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Mark Boyon, the CEO of Polygon, nice to have you.

Thanks for taking the time for us here today.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.

So right now through the lens of traditional finance, money moves through layers.

You've got payment processors, you've got banks, etc.

Talk to me about how your open money stack differs from the process a lot of people might be a bit more familiar with.

Yes, so the whole idea with the open money stack is that we can have one fully integrated payment stack that allows you to move money anywhere in the world seamlessly, right?

So you think of like how you typically move money and basically what you're going to be met with is friction, right?

You're like a compliance check over here, you're going to have something held up over there.

You're going to have no idea where your payment's actually at.

The open money stack, you can onboard money onto a chain.

You can move it anywhere in the world.

You can offboard it.

You can move it between chains.

So what you really get is this idea that like I always think back at like Christmas 5 years ago when somebody said send me money and I couldn't send money back in Canada.

I was like, OK, how do I actually do this?

And at this point in time I'd be like, I can take my stablecoins, I can send it to you back home, and you'd have it immediately.

What are the difficulties, the biggest headwinds with building something like an open money stack?

It sounds great for the end user, but we have no idea what it takes to actually build brand new infrastructure like this.

Yes, it really comes down to how you think about the structure, right?

So most of the times when you look at the solutions that exist today, really what you're talking about.

That is 7 to 8 different vendors that you're like taping together and you know when you're taping together vendors that friction is actually felt.

So the whole idea behind the open money stack is that we could create one single API that you plug into and you can get the benefits of that money movement anywhere in the world the way that we were just talking about.

Uh, how difficult, if at all, is it to incentivize developers to build apps natively directly onto Polygon?

Yeah, this hasn't really been a challenge at all.

There's a few reasons for it.

First is, I think with Polymarket fully built on Polygon and been on Polygon for a long time, everyone knows that you can build a fantastic application and have it be very, very successful.

But on top of that, like they've seen, I think we're around $2.5 trillion now transacted on, on Polygon.

I think we've got over 21% of all stablecoin USD transactions on Polygon.

And so when you consistently see delivery of high quality transactions executed in seconds and in some cases milliseconds, then you end up feeling very confident that you can build your application there and be very successful.

What do you see ultimately as being Polygon's biggest edge in a world where the big banks more and more are having their own crypto pushes?

Yes, we kind of see it as an opportunity to work with the banks actually.

So banks really aren't touching stablecoins these days, right?

They're touching, they're like investigating tokenized deposits.

They understand that like that's, that's the area where they should focus on.

The idea of like being able to move money anywhere in the world is not something that they've actually been focused on in the same way.

So for us, the opportunity is that kind of interaction between stablecoins and tokenized deposits, right?

Where you're able to convert those tokenized.

Deposits into stablecoins and then use them however you want.

Send money back home, earn off of those stablecoins, tons of different use cases that you can have that you can't necessarily do within the banking system.

Mark, it's great to have you.

The worst part about this interview is that I'm out of time and have to leave it there.

So please come see us again from Arizona.

Really a pleasure.

Mark Boyron, CEO of Polygon, congratulations.

Thanks for doing this.

Thanks for having me.