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This week Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo- an OCC-chartered national bank, digital asset custody pioneer, and a company that just went public - and Sam Broner, founder of The Better Money Company and former partner at a16z, who's building what may become the defining infrastructure layer for stablecoin payments: a clearing house.

The most striking moment came from Belshe, who laid out a sharp thesis on why the current banking system quietly forces retail depositors to subsidize institutional borrowers - and why stablecoins are the mechanism that finally breaks that dynamic. "The institutions are borrowing at 6%. The bank is keeping most of it and paying you 0.1%. What they could have done is paid you the risk-free rate and charged that guy 10% - but they didn't. Because the banks are competing for institutional business."

🎙️Listen to the full episode here or 📷 watch on YouTube

We cover:

The Interest Debate Is Really a Retail vs. Institutional Fight

Belshe framed the stablecoin interest debate as a three-sided battle: banks lobbying against it, crypto companies pushing for it, and skeptics worried about systemic risk. His position was direct: "The crypto companies are on the right side of history. It will eventually be interest out to retail."

The deeper argument is structural. BitGo operates as a 100% reserve bank - no depository or lending risk, audited twice a month. As Belshe put it, stablecoins "don't need FDIC insurance because they're held in 100% reserve. They'll always get you the risk-free rate, which is way better than what banks are doing. They work 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

He went further, arguing that the existence of PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App is itself proof that banks were never good at payments.

Stablecoin Clearing Is Going Live

Seven months after the GENIUS Act was signed, enterprises are moving to market at what Broner called "breakneck pace" - but not for consumer use cases first. "It's often for treasury management, it's for bill pay. It's for things that sort of look like ACH today. Those are scenarios that we're starting to see come to market first."

Better Money Company's clearing house is moving its first live money by end of April, with builder partners including Ramp, Modern Treasury, and Mesh already onboarding. The clearing house also solves a credit risk problem that gets sharper as stablecoins proliferate - as Simon Taylor put it, "Maybe you want to receive USDC, but somebody wants to send you Simon coin. And Simon coin has just been made up and vibe coded. Do you really want to accept that?"

Broner's emerging vision is a simplified three-layer stack - a wallet, a payments clearing house, and an onchain FX provider - that gives any remittance or payments company the building blocks to move money globally without correspondent banking. The proliferation of stablecoins post-GENIUS Act is creating real friction - slippage, non-deterministic settlement, mint-and-burn fees - and a clearing house that guarantees price and settlement time is exactly the infrastructure enterprise clients expect. As Broner described it: "You can send one stablecoin, receive another, and do it with a guaranteed settlement time and a guaranteed price."

Stablecoin FX: Capital Velocity Over Credit Lines

OpenFX's $94M raise at a $500M valuation highlighted the $200 trillion FX market's vulnerability. Legacy correspondent banking charges retail and SMBs 50-150 bps with multi-day settlement; OpenFX charges 1-30 bps with 98% of transactions settling under 60 minutes.

Broner drew an important distinction: "FX is different than payments, because FX does involve a trade." The advantage of stablecoin-based FX isn't just cost - it's capital velocity. "Instead of relying on lines of credit, you can just move faster and turn over the same amount of money many more times in a day."

Belshe was equally blunt about the traditional banking side: "Correspondent banking is just gone. You don't need that."

Sheffield offered a measured counterpoint worth noting: at certain liquidity sizes, stablecoin-to-local-fiat rates can still be worse than USD-to-local-fiat. "Over time, our view is that that should converge," he said, but that convergence hasn't fully arrived.

Tokenized Securities: The Collateral Wedge

Belshe's candor on tokenized securities stood out. After BitGo acquired Harbor in 2020 for tokenized real estate, they shelved most of it - "it was just too early." He noted that from 2020 to 2024, multiple compliant ATS venues launched and "then nobody uses it," because legacy markets aren't actually inefficient when you account for volume. "Efficiency is cost divided by volume, and the volume on traditional markets is massive."

What's working right now is fragmented but instructive. Belshe highlighted Figure Markets as the most ambitious model - a fully direct onchain equity with a separate class of shares, an ATS for trading, and market-making that moves shares back and forth between tradfi and blockchain. "I love what Figure is doing. Aspirationally, they're taking off the hardest problem to get to the best product."

Then there's the DTCC's approach using ownership claims rather than bearer stock, and the Robinhood-style SPV wrapping model - each carrying a very different risk profile.

But Belshe thinks the real wedge is collateral for lending. Most people don't have $25,000 in Bitcoin - but many hold that much in Tesla, Microsoft, or AT&T stock. Tokenizing those equities to use as onchain collateral starts to bring traditional assets into digital finance and primes the liquidity flywheel.

Meanwhile, Midas raised $50M (led by RE and Creandum and backed by Coinbase, Franklin Templeton, Anchorage) to build the liquidity layer tokenized assets have been missing, with $1.7B in total assets minted and $500M TVL. Broner captured the positioning well: "You got to find those use cases where underserviced customers go today."

One Fortune 500 CFO told Broner plainly: "I actually don't know how much money I have right now." That's the problem onchain finance solves.

The One Wallet and Cross-Collateralized Credit

Sheffield's recurring vision got its clearest articulation yet: "My dream would be that 99.9% of my money would be in assets. I have no reason to just sit on cash."

The product implication is a cross-collateralized credit card -Bitcoin, gold, Tesla stock, and treasuries in one portfolio backing a single credit line. "Billions of people should be able to access that same type of product that today billionaires access," Sheffield said, openly inviting builders to collaborate.

Belshe immediately wanted in -but flagged the hard part: "Where's the risk? Inside the crypto world, we're still building the foundations." His argument is that 100% reserve banking provides the right base layer: your assets stay put until you decide to lend them out, on your terms.

What's Next

Belshe predicted tech-forward, regulated entities will take cross-border payments from traditional banks within 24 months - calling it "the biggest move that's happening soon in digital assets."

Sheffield's vision of the "one wallet" - where 99.9% of wealth sits in assets rather than cash, with cross-collateralized credit lines against mixed portfolios - drew immediate interest from Belshe for collaboration.

And the quantum question isn't going away. Belshe said it was a top-five question during BitGo's IPO roadshow: "Even if you don't believe it's going to happen in 2029, it's preventing people from buying and participating right now in 2026."

Four things need to happen: onchain protocol updates, wallet integration, user migration - and then the existential question of what to do with Satoshi's coins.

The infrastructure buildout is accelerating across the board. Valinor raised $25M for onchain private credit. Latitude raised $8M for stablecoin global payouts. Ramp launched stablecoin accounts in public beta. Plume is piloting salary payouts directly into tokenized funds. The pieces are assembling fast.

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