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This week, Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by Prabhakar Reddy, CEO & Founder of OpenFX, the stablecoin-native FX infrastructure platform that just raised $94 million in a Series A, and Thomas Cowan, Head of Tokenization at Galaxy, where he's leading the firm's push into directly tokenized equities, onchain shareholder voting, and tokenized structured products.
Jamie Dimon just called blockchain - including stablecoins, smart contracts, and tokenization - a new competitive threat to JP Morgan. In the same week, Argentinian banks tested JPM's deposit token. Meanwhile, a startup founder who spent weeks inside a top-10 bank's FX infrastructure team raised $94M to build what those banks won't: real-time, stablecoin-native cross-border settlement rails.
We cover:
Why a founder who called 43 cross-border payment companies concluded this isn't a stablecoin problem - it's an FX problem
JP Morgan settles once a day. Ask for twice, you're blacklisted. What that means for stablecoin rails.
Jamie Dimon naming blockchain as a competitive threat - and the cost-structure argument banks can't wave away
Galaxy's directly tokenized stock, onchain AGM voting with Broadridge, and commercial paper issued on Solana via Kinexys
Three competing structures for equity tokenization - no winner yet
Why tokenization momentum has decoupled from crypto prices entirely
And Rapid-fire: Swiss franc stablecoin sandbox, Coinbase's OCC charter, Japan's interbank settlement, Visa's agentic commerce push
Key Takeaways:
The FX Liquidity Gap
The headline number is $94 million - OpenFX's Series A - but the more telling figure came from Prabhakar Reddy's deep dive into how money actually moves. After calling 43-44 cross-border payment companies and spending weeks embedded inside a top-10 bank's FX infrastructure team, Reddy arrived at a conclusion that frames the entire episode: "Banks are in the business of holding money, not moving money."
The friction isn't accidental. As Reddy explained, “JP Morgan, for context, does one settlement a day. Ask for two, and you're blacklisted.”
Cuy Sheffield laid out a useful three-era framework for how stablecoin FX is evolving:
Era one: Retail crypto exchanges as the only on/off-ramp for stablecoins into local currency
Era two: Purpose-built, stablecoin-native FX platforms (where OpenFX sits today)
Era three: Banks themselves adopting the infrastructure and playing their existing FX role with stablecoins
The last-mile reality in emerging markets is messier than most realize. Reddy described building RPA systems that mimic human operators to interface with banks that still require portal logins, facial verification, and OTPs - just to execute a payout. As Simon put it: "You've reverse-engineered Plaid at the last mile in order to just make a payment." OpenFX is live in 15 currencies, expanding to 50 by year-end, and positioning itself as "the underlying AWS rails" for the entire payment lifecycle - collections, banking, FX, and payouts.
Dimon's Blockchain Concession
Jamie Dimon's annual letter contained two quotes worth sitting with: "A whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain, which includes stablecoins, smart contracts and other forms of tokenization," and, "We need to roll out our own blockchain technology." From a CEO who's spent a decade as crypto's most prominent skeptic, that's a concession worth reading twice.
As Thomas Cowan from Galaxy framed it: "You can separate tokenization from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and just look at this as a better, faster way to move and store value. It's just, at the end of the day, plumbing."
Cuy offered a two-lens competitive framework for how banks should think about this. The first lens - stablecoins enabling new products that banks aren't offering - is visible but easy for US banks to dismiss ("that's not our business"). The second lens is harder to ignore: "Blockchains and stablecoins could change the cost structure of financial services entirely on the back end." The three biggest costs at banks - people, manual processes, and legacy vendors - are all addressable with smart contract automation and onchain infrastructure. As Cuy put it: "The banks that lean into this plumbing and adopt it are going to beat the banks that don't, because they're going to have a much better cost structure."
Prabhakar anchored the scale disparity: "JP Morgan moves roughly $10 trillion a day. Stripe moves $2 trillion a year. Stablecoins move $2 trillion a month." The competitive pressure, he argued, will hit international banks first - in a volatile macro environment, a 5% currency devaluation over a five-day settlement window creates real economic pain that drives institutions toward faster rails.
Tokenized Equity Gets Real
Galaxy tokenized its Class A common stock directly with Superstate in September - no SPV, no wrapper. As Cowan described it: "The token that I have in my Phantom wallet on my phone is Galaxy Class A common stock." Now, Galaxy is using Broadridge's platform for onchain shareholder voting at its May AGM. The structure: a snapshot of onchain holders, wallet-based authentication via Solana wallet adapter, and votes stored both off-chain through Broadridge and onchain on Avalanche.
This was one of the most structurally detailed segments of the conversation - because it's the first time a publicly listed company has walked through how tokenized equity translates into real corporate governance infrastructure.
Cowan identified three competing models for equity tokenization:
Incumbent-level tokenization - through DTCC, NASDAQ, or NYSE
Direct equity tokenization - as Galaxy did with Superstate, or Figure
Wrapper/SPV structures - token represents ownership in a fund that holds the stock
"Frankly, no one structure has won yet," Cowan said. Regulatory clarity will likely determine which model coalesces - similar, he noted, to the consolidation that produced the DTCC in the second half of the 20th century.
Prabhakar added a global access angle: just as stablecoins expanded the TAM of the US dollar by giving international consumers easier access, tokenized equities could do the same for US stock markets. "If I'm in India, if I'm in the Philippines, we go through a lot of hoopla to access US equity markets, but it becomes a lot easier with this."
Public Chains Win the Institutional Debate
Galaxy issued US commercial paper on Solana with JP Morgan via Kinexys in December. The private-vs.-public-chain debate that dominated institutional conversations a few years ago is, in Cowan's words, "almost totally gone." Institutions are moving toward public chains with whitelisting, permissions, and KYC/AML controls layered on top.
TradFi firms approaching Galaxy now say they "very much see this as completely separated from the price of Bitcoin" and are "doubling down on this as an infrastructure play." The pattern Cowan is seeing: start with a tokenized money market fund, move further out the risk curve, then launch a stablecoin.
Cuy noted that tokenization "has never been hotter" even as crypto prices are flat - and that conversations have shifted from price-anchored to execution-anchored. The gap is still wide, though: "You could count on one hand the number of banks that have touched a public blockchain" with commercial value.
Rapid-Fire Roundup
Several stories flagged in quick succession: UBS, Sygnum, PostFinance, and other Swiss banks launched a Swiss franc stablecoin sandbox. Coinbase received conditional OCC approval for a National Trust charter. Japan is exploring domestic interbank settlement using stablecoins. Polygon is in talks to raise $100 million for a payments business, having hired John Egan from Stripe. And Visa's work with Nevermind on Visa Intelligent Commerce - integrating cards with the x402 protocol so AI agents can pay using cards with stablecoins on the back end - which Cuy sees as the direction of travel: "Cards and stablecoins coming together, enabling some of these new agentic flows."
This episode catches the market mid-shift - not between doubt and buy-in, but between pilots and production. Dimon's letter, Galaxy's onchain AGM, and OpenFX's $94M raise all point in the same direction: the institutions aren't asking whether blockchain infrastructure matters anymore. They're asking how fast they need to move, and what they risk by waiting. The fact that this urgency is intensifying while crypto asset prices are flat may be the most telling signal of all - tokenization has found its own gravity, independent of the trading cycle.
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