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This week Simon Taylor is joined by Kim Hochfeld, Global Head of Digital and Cash at State Street Investment Management, and Dan Romero, GTM at Tempo and formerly co-founder of Farcaster. Cuy Sheffield is off this week.

The clearest message from this episode was not that stablecoins are becoming infrastructure. We have been saying that for a while. The more useful update is who is now willing to build around that assumption, and where the friction is showing up.

This week’s conversation gave us a cleaner view of the next layer of adoption. State Street Investment Management (SSIM) is launching a live onchain cash product - the State Street Galaxy Onchain Liquidity Sweep Fund, sub-advised by Galaxy Digital. This is because client demand and regulatory clarity now make that practical. MoneyGram is using stablecoins to improve settlement into a global cash-out network, not replace the hard parts of remittance. Deel is moving from contractor payouts into salaried employees, which is a much more serious test of how far stablecoin payroll can go. And in Europe, the problem is not enthusiasm. It is that non-dollar stablecoins are structurally harder to build.

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Demand Pulls, Not Theory

Kim Hochfeld from State Street (SSIM) put the first point plainly. SSIM has been managing liquidity and cash since the early 1970s and has about half a trillion dollars of cash under management. In her telling, the reason to launch now is straightforward: “cash is rapidly moving onchain,” whether through stablecoins, CBDCs, tokenized deposits, or tokenized money funds. State Street wants products that can meet investors already moving that way.

That matters because it is a better explanation of institutional timing than the usual story that banks suddenly “get” crypto. Dan Romero’s version was cleaner. For years, traditional finance could look at crypto experiments and say they were interesting but not commercially necessary. Now, in his view, two things have changed at once: there is customer demand, and there is enough regulatory clarity around stablecoins for serious institutions to act.

Hochfeld agreed directly. State Street, she said, will move quickly “where we see demand and where we have regulatory clarity.” That is the real signal here. Not a change in ideology. A change in operating conditions.

Live Product, Real Friction

One of the better parts of the episode was that the guests did not pretend the hard part is over.

Romero made the point that finance has spent the last decade dabbling in blockchain pilots that did not really matter. What is different now is the move toward products that institutions and enterprises can actually use. State Street’s fund fits that category.

But Hochfeld’s answer was the one worth lingering on. She distilled the launch process into two themes. First: “it’s complicated.” Risk, governance, cybersecurity, education, and internal alignment all had to move together. Second: despite all the talk about DLT removing intermediaries and improving efficiency, “it is definitely not quicker or cheaper yet” to launch product onchain.

That line is important. It keeps the conversation honest. The case for onchain finance, at least in this episode, is not that the cost savings have all arrived. It is that large institutions are willing to absorb current complexity because they think the direction of travel is clear enough to justify the effort.

The Quieter Remittance Story

Simon Taylor framed this well: remittance firms were once supposed to be the obvious casualties of stablecoins. Instead, some of them are moving faster than expected.

MoneyGram’s role as a Tempo validator and settlement partner is useful here because it forces a better question. If stablecoins are cheaper and faster, what exactly does the remittance company still do?

Romero’s answer was basically: quite a lot. He pushed back on the idea that remittance firms are just extractive middlemen. They handle local regulatory requirements, liquidity management, and physical cash-out in markets where that still matters. His example was simple and effective: MoneyGram has 500,000 physical locations in more than 100 countries. That is not a distribution network you replace with a cleaner API and a slide deck.

So the point is not that stablecoins eliminate remittance. It is that they can improve the settlement layer underneath it. Romero described a model where Stripe takes in funds and those funds can move to MoneyGram instantly using stablecoins, rather than waiting on batch processes, bank hours, or the quirks of traditional payment rails. The old “stablecoins kill remittance” story now looks too shallow. Stablecoins may end up making the remittance networks with real distribution more effective.

Payroll Gets More Serious

The Deel story matters for a similar reason. Contractor payouts were already a recognizable stablecoin use case. Salaried payroll is a different category.

Taylor noted that Deel had already paid 10,000 contractors in stablecoins and is now extending that into salaried employees, while also creating a dedicated crypto division. Romero’s read was that Deel is not just shipping a feature. It is preparing for a market that may change faster than incumbents expect.

He described stablecoins as “Starlink for money,” meaning a single asset that can move globally and continuously if the regulatory work is done. But he was also careful not to oversell the near term. Salaried payroll is harder than contractor payouts because payroll regulation is much more complex, especially in the US.

That is exactly why the move matters. Deel is using stablecoin payroll to build internal capability before the market fully demands it. Romero's framing was simpler: incumbents that wait risk being out-positioned by competitors designed around stablecoins from day one.

Simon added another angle worth pulling out: payouts are not just a cost story, they are a distribution wedge. Once a user receives funds into something like the MoneyGram app, that opens the door to a card and interchange revenue, and eventually to a yield product - potentially a US money market fund that the user could not easily access locally.

Faster Money, Uneven Benefits

Hochfeld gave the most nuanced part of the discussion when she split the benefits of onchain speed by use case.

In collateral management, she argued, tokenized money funds can be genuinely useful. The ability to move collateral 24/7, programmatically and with less operational friction, is attractive to traditional financial institutions. She tied this to the 2022 UK gilts crisis, arguing that tokenized money fund units could have avoided some of the clunky cash movement and forced selling dynamics that added stress to the market.

But she also made the opposite point. Once you start moving equities or FX onchain with instant settlement, the system gets more complex, not less. Traditional finance relies heavily on end-of-day netting. If settlement becomes immediate, institutions have to think much harder about balance sheet usage and intraday cash requirements.

That distinction is one of the more useful takeaways from the episode. Faster settlement is not a universal good in the same way everywhere. In remittances and payouts, it is easy to see the benefit. In core capital markets, the trade-offs get much more serious.

The Dollar Still Has the Easy Product

The title of the episode points to the last big theme: 99% of stablecoins are dollars. The Europe discussion helped explain why.

Taylor noted that Qivalis, the European banking  stablecoin consortium, has grown to 37 banks across 15 countries after adding 25 banks in eight months. That tells you there is serious interest. But the challenge is not only coordination across jurisdictions. It is reserve construction.

Romero made the clean version of the argument. A dollar stablecoin backed by US Treasuries is easy to explain. A euro stablecoin does not have the same simplicity because there is no single sovereign euro debt instrument sitting underneath it. Taylor added that under MiCA the reserve ends up looking more like a mix of high-quality liquid assets (bank deposits plus local sovereign debt) and noted this is part of why Circle's euro stablecoin has struggled to gain traction: the MiCA construction is far less profitable than the dollar model. Hochfeld then pushed the point further from an asset-management perspective: institutional investors will look under the hood of that mix, and the depth and liquidity of the underlying securities matter just as much as the nominal credit quality.

That is the more useful read on dollar dominance. It is not just brand power or first-mover advantage. The dollar currently has the cleanest reserve story.

This episode did not give us a brand new thesis on stablecoins. It gave us something more useful: a sharper map of where adoption is becoming concrete, and where the underlying constraints still bite. State Street shows that client demand plus regulatory clarity is enough to move a major asset manager into live product. MoneyGram shows that stablecoins do not erase distribution; they make strong networks more efficient. Deel shows that payroll may be one of the next serious proving grounds. And Europe shows that once you move beyond the dollar, stablecoin design gets harder in ways that are structural, not cosmetic.

Put differently, the market is getting more specific. That is a better sign than another vague claim that onchain finance is coming.

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