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"Every single fintech that we've been talking to has a roadmap to move entirely onchain over the course of the next two, three years. I can't think of a single fintech that does not have that," said Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO of Morpho — and the ripple effects of that migration were the throughline of this week's conversation.

This week, Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by Nick Philpott, Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at Zodia Markets — the institutional crypto broker backed by Standard Chartered — and Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO of Morpho, the onchain lending protocol with $4 billion in deposits on Base alone. Nick brings a deep emerging markets lens shaped by his career at Standard Chartered (he started in Nigeria), while Paul offers a front-row seat to how DeFi lending infrastructure is interfacing with traditional finance in real time.

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Non-USD Stablecoins: Wrong Currencies, Right Problem

The episode opened with Nick discussing a new Zodia Markets and Standard Chartered report titled Beyond Concentration: Where Non-USD Stablecoins Can Scale. The core numbers: USD stablecoins account for 98% of stablecoin market cap, while USD participation in FX is 89% and in cross-border flows is just 50%. That gap is the thesis.

But Nick's argument isn't about building Euro or sterling stablecoins — those currencies already settle efficiently cross-border. "If I wanted to open a Turkish lira or a Mexican peso or a Brazilian real bank account in Singapore or Australia — good luck. Not going to happen," he said. "If you're creating stablecoins that are linked to these currencies, then very quickly you can start to globalize those currencies." He pointed to the Kenyan shilling — already a quasi-stablecoin via M-Pesa — as a candidate for regional currency status across East Africa.

Notably, Zodia's real counterparties aren't tier-one banks anymore. "A lot of the conversations tend to be with central banks and, to a much larger extent, with commodities companies — oil, gas, metals, mining, agribusiness, shipping," Nick explained, because those firms grapple daily with currencies that have brutal cutoff times in the eastern hemisphere. And the GENIUS Act is adding urgency: emerging market central banks realize "a tidal wave of dollar stablecoins is going to start coming across borders," and bans aren't working.

Ramp's USDT Integration & Tether's Institutional Turn

Ramp rolled out USDT support on Ethereum, Solana, and Tether's Plasma network — with free 1:1 USD/USDT on-ramps and off-ramps. As Cuy noted, Ramp appears to be "the first large major US-based fintech to announce an integration with USDT and publicize it as an announcement."

The move raises a pointed regulatory question. USDT still sits outside the GENIUS-compliant bucket, while USAT — Tether’s separate product via Anchorage, sounds like the cleaner fit for that regime. Cuy’s point was pretty straightforward: some fintechs will offer USDT because that’s what customers want, while others will lean toward USAT to stay closer to the compliance line. That trade-off is only getting more real from here.

Nick offered the macro frame, describing USDT as "a Eurodollar for the 21st century" — dollars outside any banking system, on the open internet. Simon noted how different Tether feels compared to four or five years ago, with KPMG agreeing to audit and Tether actively freezing addresses and taking a lead on AML enforcement. Paul's view from the DeFi side added texture: USDT in DeFi tends to be used by larger wallets and wealthier users, and its dominance varies sharply by chain — $4 billion in USDC on Morpho's Base deployment, but USDT dominates on Tron and Plasma.

Paul's broader claim carried the most weight: every fintech he's talking to has an onchain roadmap for the next two to three years. And if fintechs — originally built to distribute traditional financial products — are moving deposits onchain, then tradfi has to follow those deposits or lose the AUM. "It's pretty interesting to see," he said. "I do genuinely think it's just the beginning."

DoorDash, Gig Economy Payouts & the Stablecoin Barbell

DoorDash announced stablecoin payouts via Tempo, with co-founder Andy Fang citing the pain of integrating payment systems across the 40+ markets they operate in. Cuy also raised a very practical question: does DoorDash really want every payout visible onchain? His view was that stablecoin-linked cards could help close the loop for gig workers - get paid in a stablecoin, then spend it right away.

Nick introduced a framework from separate Standard Chartered research that maps stablecoin holders as a barbell. On one end: the "Mayfair house" use case — high-net-worth individuals in volatile-currency countries who previously stored value in West London property and are now holding stablecoins instead. Nick’s point was more subtle: Mayfair prices are down 25-40%, and he suspects stablecoins are starting to absorb some of the old store-of-value demand that once flowed into London property. On the other end: the "Argentinian taxi driver" — Argentina holds more physical US dollar bills than any country after the United States, and stablecoins are replacing the cash stuffed under mattresses. "The moment it starts to become a closed system where goods and services can be bought and sold in stablecoins, you're going to start to see the development of a parallel economy," Nick said.

Paul offered a timeline: he believes stablecoins are "plausibly six to 12 months away" from becoming an expectation rather than an option — the way accepting Visa is an expectation for merchants today. Paul’s argument was that once stablecoins become an expectation — the way card acceptance is an expectation now — businesses that haven’t built for that world will start to look slow.

Coastal Community Bank: The Quietly Enormous Story

The quieter part of the Tempo announcement was its partnership with Coastal Community Bank for US-LatAm on/off ramps. That matters because, as Cuy put it, regional banks usually don’t get to move money directly across borders — they go through correspondent banks. Stablecoins could start to change that. "There's no way for a regional bank and Coastal Community Bank to send money to a regional bank in Brazil — that doesn't exist. Now with stablecoins, it could," he said.

Simon flagged this as the story that really stood out to him — noting that Coastal has "never been quite as far out on the risk curve" as other sponsor banks in the space, which makes their entry a signal that adoption is broadening past the usual early movers like Cross River and Lead Bank.

The Aave Stress Test: Technology vs. Underwriting

The $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit — where an attacker minted unbacked rsETH and used it as collateral on Aave to borrow real assets — triggered the most technically dense segment of the episode. Paul’s version of the stress test was stark: more than $10 billion had come out of Aave over five days, while roughly $5 billion in ETH was effectively stuck in the withdrawal queue. The commingling of markets meant the crisis spread from ETH lending pools into USD stablecoin markets as well — every USDC and USDT market on mainnet was fully illiquid.

Cuy distilled the institutional takeaway he's been sharing: "Lending protocols, technology, smart contracts, are very, very cool and have many innovations, but only if you either trust what the collateral is backing them or the way that the underwriting is happening." The problem wasn't the lending technology — it was accepting restaked ETH IOUs as collateral in the first place.

Paul drew the critical distinction: "The mental model is differentiating the smart contract and the lending technology from the bank itself, and how the risk management within the bank is done." Nick reinforced the point with historical parallels — comparing the dynamics to Refco in 2005, the Knickerbocker Trust in 1907, and the fundamental concept of maturity mismatch: locked assets with fast liabilities released against them. "None of this is new," he said.

TradFi Sees Opportunity, Not a Warning

What really stood out was the reaction to the Aave crisis: Paul expected institutions to recoil, but some of them saw the mess as an opening. Rather than pulling back, tradfi firms that have been learning onchain infrastructure for the past year and a half see the blowup as a competitive opening. As Paul described it: "They're basically saying, 'Those guys are jokers. They don't know how to run proper asset management businesses. We are going to come in with our 30 years of expertise, understand the technology, and we're going to do a much stronger job.'"

Their sales pitch to crypto-native platforms is straightforward: traditional underwriting models, but on onchain rails — with none of the restaking collateral risk. Nick put a fine point on it with a simple analogy: "Stock certificates can be faked, but that didn't stop us from continuing to use stock certificates."

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