If you're reading this and still haven't signed up, click the subscribe button below!

This week Simon Taylor is joined by Wyatt Lonergan, General Partner at VanEck Ventures and formerly a GP at Circle Ventures, alongside Mark Greenberg, VP of B2B at Kraken.

Together, they bring three useful angles to this week's conversation: venture perspective on stablecoin infrastructure, operator insight from one of crypto's largest exchanges, and Simon's usual habit of dragging the discussion back to the part of the stack that actually matters. 

🎙️ Listen to the latest episode of Tokenized here, or📷 watch on YouTube.

The Off-Ramp Bottleneck

The first big point was simple: getting into stablecoins is not the hard part anymore. Getting out still is. As Wyatt Lonergan put it, “getting dollars into stablecoins, I don't think has ever really been the problem. It's getting cash out.” That was the real significance of Kraken’s MoneyGram partnership. Not just another crypto partnership headline, but a reminder that last-mile distribution is still one of the hardest things to build in global finance.

Mark Greenberg said Kraken customers can now withdraw crypto as cash through 500,000 retail locations across more than 100 countries using MoneyGram’s network, with bank withdrawals expected to follow across those markets in the coming months.

Simon made the point directly that people were too quick to assume companies like MoneyGram and Western Union were finished once stablecoins showed up. That missed what those businesses actually built. The hard part was never just messaging money internationally. It was distribution at the edge: the ability to get someone cash or local settlement in the place they actually live.

Cards Become the Interface

The second major theme was cards. Kraken parent Payward’s $600 million acquisition of Reap, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin card and spend platform serving 22,000 businesses across Asia, was one of the clearest signals in the episode that cards are no longer a side story in stablecoins. They’re becoming one of the main interfaces through which stablecoins reach actual business activity.

Greenberg noted that businesses were already using Kraken Pro as an invoicing and payments tool even though it was not built for that purpose. In other words, demand showed up first. Product strategy followed it.

Lonergan framed the broader pattern as the “verticalization of the stack.” Stripe, Payward, Rain, and others are all trying to own more of the stablecoin payments surface area at once - issuance, routing, cards, compliance, and the customer relationship.

That is not just about convenience. It is also about economics. As Simon walked through, the more of the card stack a company controls - program management, issuer processing, licensing - the more of the economics it owns, and the easier it becomes to scale internationally.

What stood out here was how far the industry has moved from the old “fees are bad” posture. The conversation was much more mature than that. Interchange was treated as part of the business model that funds broader access, better routing, and global usability. Slightly less romantic than the old crypto line, but a lot more commercially serious.

The Multi-Rail Future

One of the important parts of the episode was how little ideological baggage there was around payments rails. Nobody seriously argued that stablecoins simply replace everything. The discussion was much more practical: some corridors will work better on stablecoins, others on ACH, RTP, SWIFT, cards, or some mix of all of them.

That came through clearly in the Corpay x JPMorgan x BVNK story. Lonergan’s framing was the right one: “we're not just replacing SWIFT here, we're augmenting it.”

That is a more credible way to think about the market. Enterprises do not care about rail ideology. They care about cost, speed, reliability, corridor coverage, compliance, and user preference.

Greenberg made a similar point from the cross-border side. Traditional rails still make sense in-country in many cases. But for international money movement, stablecoins are often much easier, and over time they are likely to become part of the default stack for cross-border settlement.

Put differently, the market is not moving toward one rail to rule them all. It is moving toward smarter routing across multiple rails. That may be less dramatic as a slogan, but it is much closer to how financial infrastructure actually gets adopted.

Treasury, Not Just Payments

The quieter part of the episode was treasury. And over time, that may matter more than the payments headlines.

Lonergan pointed to a major enterprise pain point: companies still have to manage pre-funded accounts and fragmented bank relationships across multiple jurisdictions. If stablecoins can connect into existing last-mile networks, they could reduce the need to keep capital trapped all over the world just to support cross-border activity.

Simon expanded that into a much broader treasury vision. The goal is not necessarily one giant pool of money with all risk concentrated in one place. It is one operational layer — one place to see and control balances, routing, and movement across different institutions, currencies, and settlement types without maintaining dozens of local integrations into ERP systems and bank infrastructure.

That matters because the real enterprise prize here may not be “faster payments” in the narrow sense. It may be lower prefunding costs, less trapped liquidity, and simpler treasury operations. That is a much bigger budget line.

24/7 Settlement Pressure

The next forcing function is around-the-clock settlement. Simon made the point clearly: traders can now see markets move over the weekend, especially in crypto-native venues, while much of the traditional financial system still cannot settle in real time because the underlying cash rails are closed.

He flagged the practical constraints directly: CLS is closed at the weekend, and Fedwire remains functionally closed on Saturdays through 2028.

Once you start from that reality, the stablecoin use case starts to look less like a crypto preference and more like a settlement necessity.

Greenberg tied this directly to tokenized equities, noting that if equities begin trading 24/7, “the hardest part of this is actually figuring out how to get cash in and out on the weekend right now.”

Tokenized Equities Need Legal Compatibility

The last major theme was tokenized equities, and the discussion here was refreshingly serious. Not because everyone agreed, but because they were arguing about the right problem.

The Bullish acquisition of Equiniti for $4.2 billion was framed as a way to bring tokenized equity infrastructure together with the transfer-agent layer that still matters in regulated capital markets.

Greenberg seemed more skeptical that transfer-agent-led models are the long-term winner, arguing that the stronger opportunities may sit either with exchange-driven permissioned programs or more natively onchain models like XStocks or Ondo’s global markets product.

Lonergan pushed back in a useful way. His point was that transfer agents remain a real choke point and source of truth inside capital markets, and that many tokenization efforts have tried to skip past that too quickly.

Simon then sharpened the issue: transfer agents may offer legal backward compatibility with where the capital already sits today, even if that also bakes in some legacy path dependence.

That is the real debate. Not whether tokenized equities are coming, but what kind of market structure gets them there. Native onchain design is cleaner in theory. But regulated capital does not move just because the architecture is elegant. It moves when legal ownership, compliance, and operational compatibility line up.

Closing thought

The interesting question coming out of this episode isn't whether stablecoins have a use case. It's who gets to control the points where stablecoins touch the rest of finance: the off-ramps, the card networks, the treasury dashboards, the transfer agent layer. Every story this week was a different company trying to lock down one of those interfaces. That race is just getting started.

Thanks so much for reading the Tokenized Newsletter!

Please share this edition or share it with your colleagues if you enjoyed it!

Disclaimers