Why All Money Will Be On Chain in 10 Years With the CEO of Polygon Labs, Marc Boiron

What happens when all the world’s money moves on chain? That’s not a hypothetical for Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, it’s the company’s mission. In this episode, Marc explains how Polygon is evolving from its roots as an Ethereum layer two into the blockchain for global payments, detailing two recent acquisitions that form the foundation of what he calls the “open money stack” – a single API combining on-ramps, wallets, and cross-chain interoperability.

With over $2.5 trillion in transaction volume already processed and partnerships with Revolut, Stripe, Nubank, and dozens of fintechs across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Marc makes the case that stablecoins are just the beginning. He shares why tokenized bank deposits will be the real game-changer, how banks are already positioning to profit from this shift, and why, in 10 years, he believes every dollar, whether paying a merchant down the street or sending a remittance across the globe, will move on a blockchain without anyone even thinking about it.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Marc first got interested in blockchain and crypto technology.
• Why he decided to make the move to Polygon Labs.
• Why Polygon decided to focus on payments.
• All the components you need to move money around the world on blockchain.
• The idea behind the open money stack.
• How Polygon is working with the likes of Revolut and Stripe.
• How they differentiate themselves from the other payments blockchains.
• What they are doing in AML and sanctions policy.
• The scale that Polygon is at today when it comes to transaction volume.
• What will the financial system look like when more money stays on chain.
• The two things banks ask in their initial conversations with Polygon.
• How money will transform in the next 10 years and why most people will not notice.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 571: Marc Boiron

Marc Boiron

We do spend a lot of time talking about stablecoins, but stablecoins are not going to be the only type of money that is on chain. We’re going to see more and more like tokenized deposits, right? These are like actual deposits at banks that are on chain. And that is something that we obviously cannot ignore because that is going to be core to actually moving. Once that’s on chain, now what you need to be able to do is move those funds from like, you know, JP Morgan’s Kinexis to Polygon in a seamless way.

Well, that is much easier to do than to move it from a JP Morgan bank account onto Polygon. And so I think there’s this key step that banks themselves are going to be tokenizing the deposits that actually exist. There’s a reason why so many banks have pilots or actual blockchains that are in effect within their organizations already because they understand the 10x difference of on-chain money to off-chain money.

Peter Renton (00:01.39)

This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. Today’s conversation takes us deep into the future of money movement and blockchain technology.

My guest is Marc Boiron, the CEO of Polygon Labs, one of the most ambitious blockchain players making moves in the payment space. What makes Marc’s story particularly interesting is his unconventional path to leading a major blockchain company. As a lawyer by training who got hooked on Ethereum back in 2015, he’s brought a unique perspective to an industry that desperately needs people who understand both traditional finance and cutting-edge technology. After serving as chief legal officer at both dYdX and Polygon, he took the helm as CEO with the bold mission, move all money on chain.

Polygon has already processed over two and a half trillion dollars in transaction volume and works with household names like Revolut, Stripe, Nubank, and dozens of fintechs and banks across the Americas, Africa and Asia.

But Marc isn’t just talking about incremental improvements to cross border payments. He’s building what he calls an open money stack, made possible by two recent significant acquisitions to bring together on-ramps, wallets, and cross-chain interoperability into a single solution, which we’ll discuss in some depth. And make sure you listen right to the end where Mark provides his vision for what finance will look like a decade from now. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Marc.

MB: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here, Peter.

PR: My pleasure. Excited to have you. So I like to these things started by giving listeners a little bit of background. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. You do, you’ve had some interesting stops. It looks like you, you’re a lawyer by training, which you don’t often see as a CEO of a FinTech company, but tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to Polygon Labs.

MB: Yeah, sure. So like you said, I’m a lawyer by background, left law school, went straight into practicing law. But, you know, I often say that being a lawyer, especially when you’re a partner in a law firm, you’re really just a glorified salesperson. That’s really what you’re doing. You’re selling your services. And I was pretty good at that. But one of the things that I recognized was that, you know, being a lawyer was really not in the long run what I wanted to do. So I went in-house, I joined a crypto company called dYdX where that is a perpetual exchange where I was the chief legal officer over there, left there and joined Polygon as the chief legal officer. And after a year as chief legal officer at Polygon, I took over as CEO. And really my perspective on this is when you’re in the crypto space, one of the things that is hardest to find is somebody who has a balance between I think the traditional finance worlds and frankly like just traditional way of doing things from an organizational perspective, from a finance perspective, and then those who actually understand like the technology and the benefits of crypto. And I think that I’d like a good balance between those two things.

PR: So then how did you first get interested in crypto and blockchain technology?

MB: Back in, let’s see, mid 2015, I read about Ethereum and I’m a curious person. And so I couldn’t help myself, but keep reading about Ethereum. And that was how I got interested in crypto in general. That translated into a legal practice, mostly because, you know, I was looking at the fact that there’s like millions of lawyers around the world and there’s very little differentiating factors about lawyers. And so I thought, you know, what’s the best way that I can charge premium value as a lawyer? And the simple answer was get really good in a niche. And if I know that well and I’ve picked the right niche, then I’ll do phenomenally well.

And so in beginning 2017, took a bet that crypto and blockchains would end up being really big, which turned out to be right. And I happened to be one of the few lawyers who actually understood both legal aspects of it, but also the technology.

PR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And as you said, it’s rare to have a FinTech CEO be a lawyer. And it’s even more rare, I think, to have a crypto CEO be. I don’t know of any other crypto company led by a lawyer. There’s probably a handful, nothing comes to mind. But anyway, let’s go back to what you’re doing now. Maybe start with why you decided to come to Polygon Labs. And maybe just a little bit history there. As we were saying before we chatted, I still have some Matic tokens in my Metamask wallet, which was, I think it predates the naming of Polygon Labs, but tell us a little bit about the history there and why you chose to come to this company.

MB: Yeah, it all comes down to what the goals are at Polygon. So the mission has actually evolved over time. Our current mission is to move all money on chain. But back in the day, there was always the same idea of how do we bring mainstream into crypto? If you look at most of crypto, the reality, and it’s OK, but it’s gambling-like behavior, right? That’s the general idea behind a lot of it. But at the core, there’s a technology here that is incredibly beneficial to how we move value around the world and having native value to the internet.

And the general idea was that we could bring that to the masses instead of focusing on just these kind of like games that a lot of people play in crypto. And Polygon was known back in right after I joined, but it was really starting already to be working with all of the big enterprises and corporates. So Polygon is very well known for the deals done working with Starbucks and with DraftKings and Reddit and Nike.

And that was the kind of like impact that I wanted to have somewhere where we could bring the technology to the world. And Polygon, I think, is the first crypto company to really try doing that. And I’d say probably the most successful in doing that at same time.

PR: Right, right. So I knew about you were like a layer two for Ethereum, right? And now you’re going to, you talk about being the blockchain for global payments. I mean, that’s, they’re two very different things. And are you still like, are you still a layer two for Ethereum? And that’s that part of the business is still operating.

MB: Yeah, that’s still true from a technical perspective, but we kind of moved away from this idea. Like, honestly, it’s kind of irrelevant, right? In the sense that, you know, as long as you have the underlying technology that is going to support fast, cheap, reliable payments, it doesn’t really matter what that looks like. You could talk about it being a layer one, you could talk about it being a layer two. I think the most important thing though is does Polygon offer a technology that allows for payments to be done more efficiently or not?

And that’s kind of like what we realized is, know, blockchains historically have been this idea of like come and do anything on a blockchain. It makes sense because it’s permissionless. Anybody can come and do anything. But we’ve moved into a spot where blockchains themselves don’t have many differentiating factors. Like you can look at it and I just call it commoditized block space. It’s all the same.

And so if that’s true, then we need to find a way, goes back to my story of how I got into crypto in the first place, of distinguishing yourself from finding something that is a little more niche down where you can stand out. And for Polygon, what we did about 12 months ago is we went and looked at like, where is it that we are strong in these different verticals? And we realized that we were actually doing very well in payments already. And it happens that payments was the area with the most obvious product market fit in crypto.

And so what we decided to do was just simply focus on that. And what that really means is start building the blockchain in a way that is specific to the use case of payments, but also build things on top of the chain so that when somebody says, I want to offer payments around the world, that we have a one stop solution that allows you to offer payments around the world rather than trying to be like, I heard this stablecoin thing is interesting and I want to move money with it, but I don’t know how I need to go talk to these 10 different companies to figure it out. Polygon is the place where you can come and say, I want to move money around the world in the most efficient, low cost way possible. How do I do that? The answer is just talk to somebody at Polygon and they have a solution for you. And that’s really the idea.

PR: Let’s dig into that a little bit. Moving money around the world is something that has historically been an expensive and cumbersome endeavor. Certainly not instant by any means. And now with blockchain technology, the technology does make it certainly quicker and cheaper. But maybe you can give us some use cases and tell us exactly how, we don’t have to get into the depths of the technical side of things, but I’d like to get a little more color in how it works.

MB: I think the general idea, you make the statement of like blockchains make it easier to move money. I think a lot of times in the, you know, anyone dealing with a blockchain will say, well, blockchains are great for payments. And this is a true statement, but it’s only partially true because unless you have many other things that you need, they’re not that useful for, for payments. It’s like, okay, cool. got a blockchain and you can send something somewhere, but how are people going to receive it? How are they going to use it? You know, all of those things.

So, one of the things we did about two weeks ago, we released something that we called the vision for the open money stack. And generally what this does is it kind of breaks down all of the components that you need for moving money around the world on a blockchain. And it’s really like our vision of what if I fast forward 10 years from now, what I think the world is going to look like from a payments perspective. And effectively what it has is it has these various layers.

Layer one is like a blockchain itself. Right. So Polydon has a chain, but it can be other chains as well. This is great. It actually allows for that cross border money movement. But the thing is, at least today, you still need to get that money onto a blockchain. So this is like the second part of it. And this is actually an acquisition that we completed that we actually announced last week, an acquisition of Coinme that actually allows on ramps. It’s the on ramps and the off ramps that you need so that you can actually get the money onto the blockchain. OK.

But once you’ve the money onto the blockchain, you actually need to have a way to hold it, which is kind of like the wallet component of this. This is also a second announcement that we announced at the same time was the sequence that the wallet. But you also have many blockchains. Like while the polygon chain is great, there’s many other blockchains out there and you need to be realistic that like payments are going to happen on all of them. And you need some kind of cross-chain interoperability solution that allows for, you know, you can send money from, you know, polygon to Arc, for example, or Arc to polygon seamlessly.

This is another part of that stack. So our perspective is you should be able to have one API that you plug into that then allows you to on-ramp, off-ramp, send money using a blockchain from one wallet to another wallet on any chain. That’s the idea behind the open money stack in my view of what money will look like in 10 years from now, with the hope being that in 10 years, the on-ramp and the off-ramp are gone. You don’t need it because money is just going to live on chain.

And the reason is because you’re going to have things to do. You’ll be able to earn on chain. You’ll be able to make investments on chain. And going to those use cases, you’ll be able to do those things that enterprises need to do. They’ll be able to pay out creators, vendors, developers. They can do those payouts. Marketplaces will be able to make their payouts on both sides of the marketplace, or receiving and sending.

You know from a remittance perspective you can now easily onboard those funds and across the world and all for them if needed. Ideally you don’t need to. You can actually just hold those U.S. stablecoins and then earn on them. Banks right now they need to rely on Swift. They need to rely on the correspondent banking network.

Whether it’s stable coins or tokenized deposits, they should be able to like send money around the world without uncertainty as to like what fees are going to look like for their customers. And when payments are actually going to arrive, they should be able to send them on a platform or another blockchain and get them there. So that’s some like the use case that you can do based off of like this idea of like one kind of like open money stack.

PR: Can we maybe, I mean, I’m looking on your website, you’ve got some pretty major brands on there, but a couple that I’m interested in that obviously everyone knows about, mean, you’re working with Revolut, Stripe is another logo I saw there. What are you providing for these companies?

MB: Yeah, so historically, before we actually made these acquisitions that I was referring to, what Polygon has been is a blockchain. That’s what it provides. So when we think of it for Revolut, for example, it’s the blockchain that they can use when users want to send money around the world, they can use Polygon for that. I think there’s been just over a billion dollars sent using Revolut around the world on Polygon so far.

Stripe is a little bit different. It’s on the merchant side of things, right? So on the merchant side of things, it’s, you know, somebody wants to accept USDC mispayment. so Stripe enables them to do that and they can use Polygon for the actual transfer of the USDC. So those are kind of two different use cases. There’s probably about a hundred fintechs currently using Polygon for very different, some of them cards. Like one very interesting use case is definitely the use of debit cards to pay for stuff using stablecoins on them. So Rain, for example, does a lot of volume one, volume one.

PR: interesting. I just, had the CEO of Rain on a few months back. It’s a, they just raised a massive, a massive funding round recently, but I want to go back. I read about the two acquisitions that you mentioned. Simon Taylor had a big thing about it. And I also, it was everywhere online, last week, but one of the things that I’m curious about is that, you know, you have like you mentioned Arc, I mean, that’s sort of Coinbase’s walled gardens, the way I understand it, you’ve got, you know, Stripe has Tempo. There’s lots of other, other less big names out there, but what, how are you differentiating from the other people that also doing move money on chain, you know, cross border, whatever that, that, are you differentiating?

MB: Yeah, it’s a great question. So there’s two parts to this. One is, given the size of this market, my view, like everyone wants to like put us in Stripe and Circle, like head to head on, we need to compete to the death. Look, I there’s competition there, but the amount of stablecoins that are about to come into the world and on chain is going to dwarf what anyone can handle. And so everyone’s going to do well. But in the context of kind of like competition there, there’s a few things that are differentiated. think first is most are focusing on just one aspect of the stack. They’re not offering a complete solution.

So what happens is they want to talk about our blockchain. But then what their questions go to next is we need this wallet. What do we use for a wallet? We need to get on-ramping and off-ramping. What do we use for that? I heard about this interop thing because I like Polygon, but I probably need to support other chains because there’s other chains out there. And so I want to support Tempo. I want to support Arc. You what do I, what do I do? One of the big things that we’re focused on is really delivering this one API that will allow them to very simply get access to all of those things. And this is not something that people often say, like, who’s your competitor? And I really struggle to point to who that is because everyone is doing things at like different points in the stack.

There’s nobody who’s really bringing that stack holistically together in like one easy way to use. Probably the closest in some ways is Stripe, but they’re still very separate. There’s Stripe, there’s Privy that they’ve acquired, there’s Bridge that they’ve acquired and they’re working on Tempo. So I that’s the closest comparison there, but definitely very far from like an integrated solution.

The second thing that’s very unique about Polygon is that most others are building from like the user down and we are building from like the kind of brass metal up. And there’s a few advantages when like in the blockchain context in doing this. The first one is because we have a blockchain that’s been built over the last five and a half years, what we have is an entire set of infrastructure built around there. So there’s a lot…for like a blockchain to actually be usable by lot of people. Like you need a lot of different things. We haven’t talked about like nodes and RPCs and the like. You need all of these different components. These have been built over years by Polygon.

You also need an entire ecosystem. So when we talk about Revolut and Stripe, you can also talk about Bitso and Newbank in Latam. You can talk about Flutterwave in Africa. can talk about Dlocal in Southeast Asia. There’s dozens of projects all around the world that are already on Polygon. Now, this is really important because you actually need an entire ecosystem. Just having like one player doing something is not really actually all that useful. You actually need somebody that when you say, hey, I’m going to send you some funds, they’re like, okay, cool. I can actually off ramp this because there’s support in the app that they use. And when you go to like Latam, there’s not a single FinTech that supports a blockchain that does not support Polygon.

So what that means is that you can go ahead and off board. You can receive the funds on Polygon and then you can go ahead and off board them without problems. This also means that we have distribution that others don’t have. We have relationships in all of these regions. Like literally, it’s entirely global. So this from a growth perspective gives a significant advantage because we’re already talking to most of the teams that are looking at blockchains in Latam, in Africa, in India, in the rest of Southeast Asia, in the UK, in the US.

And so that is very different from your traditional players that think very regional and local. And then the last thing that I’ll say is most of them think from a I’ll call them off chain first perspective. They think, how do I take a fiat currency that is like in the world? And then how do I end up in that world again? We think of it very much on how do we keep people on the blockchain? This does not mean that we restrict you, right? It’s very open. You can take the money off.

But we’re going to give you options to do things with your money on chain. So like we’ll give you the option to like earn yield, probably higher yield than you could earn off chain. So you have no reason to leave. Now, if you’re an enterprise and you’re moving money constantly around the world and you have two choices, choice number one is I can move money onto the blockchain. I can transfer it somewhere else and then I can off ramp it. And I’m going to pay fees on the first part of the leg. I’m going to pay fees on the last part of the leg.

By way, then I’m going to whip days and then I’m going to deposit it in an investment product that I want to hold. And then a week later, I need to move it again. So I’m going to on-ramp it again and I’m going to send it and pay fees, we’re just choice number two is I’m going to pay to on-ramp it. I’m going to send it to my other entity. Let’s just say this is like a self-to-self enterprise type transaction. and by the way, I have this on-chain investment product that I can deposit this in, right? Think of like Biddle from BlackRock or Franklin Templeton’s fund or a cramps like fund, you’ve got a bunch of like these on chain funds that are now available where you can continue to have a on chain currency. And when you want to go back to sending dollars again, you can instantly just redeem that, get your on chain money and send it again.

That is like the mindset that we come from that is very different from the mindset of we make fees off of every time somebody on ramps and off ramps and we want to incentivize them to do that. What that means is when we fast forward years from now, the money is going to be sitting on Polygon because people have something to do with it, which they already have in trying to expand.

PR: A lot of people will be listening to this and thinking, well, a lot of people are using blockchain technology to evade sanctions. The bad guys are moving money around the world. There’s stories every day about another someone else that’s using tether or what have you to money launder or to evade sanctions. So what can you tell us about what you’re doing for AML and sanctions policy?

MB: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple parts to it. One is there’s obvious points at where compliance applies in a very clear way and you need to fulfill the requirements for that. And like the simple things are on ramps and off ramps, right? Like when we think of working with CoinMe and the diligence we did on CoinMe, it’s how good of a compliance program do you have that you’re following and best practices over there? To me, this is like not even debatable. There’s nothing to talk about. That is the traditional compliance that you’re following all the time.

The second thing then becomes, okay, once your money is actually on chain, so you’ve already passed all the compliance checks required, but from an AML perspective, but also from a sanctions perspective, now the question is what do you do in the next part of your life? And the thing is tools have gone in like very good with on chain. So there’s companies like TRM, Ellipsis, Chainalysis, these are companies that exist for compliance purposes that we build into our products so that they’re available.

When somebody is going to send money to a new address, what you want to be doing is you want to actually make sure that you are checking whether that address is a sanctioned address or it is in a region that is a sanctioned region, and you’re not going to allow those transfers built into your app. We enable you to have that available in your application so that you can block those transfers. This is the same approach that you would take otherwise.

The argument that many could make is we don’t actually need to do that because it is just a on-chain transfer that somebody is making. That’s a choice that a fintech can make themselves. They can say a blockchain transfer is just a transfer from the individual to another individual. And that is not something that we need to concern ourselves with. I think there’s different fintechs that are going to take different positions. Our job is we need to give you the tools to ensure that you can be compliant based off of your compliance policies, right?

And so that’s why our job is to on the on ramps, off the on, off ramps, we need to provide compliance and we need to do that ourselves. But then when you’re actually on chain, we need to provide you with those tools, all of which are available like in our product suite and on Polygon.

PR: You know, on your website, it’s kind of, you know, it’s front and center, literally, on your site saying, it’s not our first trillion. That is the big, text on your website. So maybe you can give us a sense of the scale. Like what, where are you at today?

MB: Yeah, so we do differentiate between like payments and just transaction volumes in general. There’s been about two and a half trillion dollars of transaction volume on Polygon. So when we say it’s not our first trillion, we literally mean it’s not our first trillion. We’ve done over two trillion dollars in value transfer. Now, a lot of that has been payments, but also a lot of it has been, you know, creating in some way. You know, there’s other big applications on Polygon.

So Polymarket, for example, probably the best known pure crypto application being a prediction market is on Polygon. They do a lot of volume. So that two trillion reflects the total value that’s been transferred on Polygon. And there’s a significant portion of this that’s been done in peer to peer transfers, as well as transfers through FinTech apps or by enterprises. And then there’s another portion of that that’s being done for trading purposes on decentralized exchanges or prediction markets like Polymarket.

PR: So I want to spend the last part of our conversation here talking about the future and you’ve kind of you’ve touched on it a little bit, but you know, I’m very curious and I’ve had quite a few stablecoin blockchain people on the show recently because it feels like that there’s a lot of tailwinds and the technology is simply superior. So, you know, you’re knowing the existing, the traditional financial system, which let’s face the traditional financial system has very entrenched rails that, uh, been around for decades. Some of them not very efficient, but they work.

I’m curious, I’d love to kind of get your sense of, you say like the money is going to stay on chain at Polygon. How should we think about the financial system where more money stays on chain? And I’m going to have a few follow ups to that, but I’d love to kind of get your overarching vision for that?

MB: Yeah. So I think there’s two parts. First, we do spend a lot of time talking about stablecoins, but stablecoins are not going to be the only type of money that is on chain. We’re going to see more and more like tokenized deposits, right? These are like actual deposits at banks that are on chain. And that is something that we obviously cannot ignore because that is going to be core to actually moving. Once that’s on chain, now what you need to be able to do is move those funds from like, know, JP Morgan’s Kinexys to Polygon in a seamless way. Well, that is much easier to do than to move it from a JPMorgan bank account onto Polygon. And so I think there’s this key step that banks themselves are going to be tokenizing the deposits that actually exist.

There’s a reason why so many banks have pilots or actual blockchains that are in effect within their organizations already because they understand the 10x difference of on-chain money to off-chain money. So they actually need to work on that. I’ll also say that we are working with many banks already today. These are not things that have been announced yet. They will be announced. But the banks want to make money off of this as well as not be left behind.

So when I have a conversation with a bank, two things that they ask is, hey, why is this important to me? But second is, how can I make money off of it? And both of those things are very relevant. One of them is relevant in terms of protecting their existing business. And I view that very much as the tokenization of their deposits. But the second one is, well, until that actually happens at scale and I want to move money, how do I take advantage of stablecoins? And where are the fees that I can take from this?

Given the fees on traditional cross-border money movement being as high as they are, and most of that not necessarily being captured by the depository institution that it starts from, they’re very much incentivized to say, why don’t you help us transfer this to stablecoins where we can actually offer better pricing but still actually earn more fees than we would otherwise? And now what you basically have is there’s somebody else in that chain, which is a correspondent bank somewhere that has lost fees, probably through some kind of like FX margin that they’re not taking, that now is being captured by that bank upfront.

So I very much view this as banks are going to be on the side of tokenizing deposits and are actually going to come along here in many cases. I think in the cases where that does not naturally happen, what you do have is a product that is 10x better, period. And when you have a product that’s 10x better, it will get adopted.

And we’re seeing it getting adopted very, very quickly right now. The simple reason is because if you go to an enterprise today and you say, you’ve got $150, $200 million that is moving around the globe at any point in time that you are not earning on, you can earn on that money. Because instead of moving it over a five to 10 day period, you can move it over a two second period, or if you assume other things, an hour or two hour period, and then you can earn off of it, they’re going to be interested in doing that.

So when you take all of this cumulatively, what you get is more and more money that is being moved on chain by banks, enterprises, fintechs. And so now the key is, do they move it off of the chain or not? And the really important part that I touched on is you have to give them something to do with it. So first of all is they do get penalized. There’s fees for moving it off chain. So they’re already disincentivized for moving it off chain unless they have nothing to do with it.

So if you give them something to do, they’ll do. So what are those things? First of all, this is why I think there’s a lot of excitement around like what people traditionally call RWAs. So, right, just tokenized assets, tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds. There’s already quite a few of these products, again, like the Black Rocks, Apollos, Franklin Templeton’s of the world, that, you know, right now an enterprise could deposit into, pull those funds on chain and use.

But they’re still not widely available. They’re still a little clunky. They’re not as easy to use as stablecoins but in the next six to 12 months I think we will see them be just as easy to use. And now you’re really not going to have a reason to off board. But on top of that, you need to have like other things that they can do, right? Like they need to actually be able to move it to somebody else in a way that that person actually wants to receive it, you know, there, right? You need that. You need accounting systems that make it. We’ve done a better job in the industry of accounting systems that take into account stable points, but it still needs to improve.

So I think there’s a lot of theoretical benefits around reconciliation, accounting in general, compliance in general, that is actually better on chain as well. But the tooling for that is not fully there yet. And I think that’s another component.

When you bring, I’ll call it like this tooling that you need around it, combined with things to do on chain, at that point, you’re an enterprise, you’re a bank, you’re a fintech, you really don’t have a reason to move it off chain, which is why I fundamentally believe that in 10 years from now, you’ll have all money on chain and people will be using it on chain.

PR: Okay, so let’s paint that picture as we close. Let’s paint that picture from 10 years from now. mean, the traditional banks, how is it going to enter sort of the, not the early adopter phase, but the mass market phase where the average person might have a bank account at Chase or Chime or SoFi, Revolut, what have you. How are they going, they’re probably not going to even know, I imagine, that this is on chain. What’s it going to look like? You just paint a picture for us.

MB: Yeah, I think when we get to that point, what we’re going to have is fully digital cash, right? Which we’re getting closer and closer to today. We still have a lot of physical cash, but more and more will be moved digital. But when it is moved into a digital form or exists in a digital form, it won’t be on a bank’s centralized database anymore. It’s going to be on that bank’s blockchain ledger. And in that form, it’s going to be a tokenized deposit, it’s going to exist, there is a deposit that’s already on chain.

So to me, all physical, all non-physical money is going to actually already exist on a blockchain. So the question from there simply becomes, how do you use that? And I view it as your tokenized deposits, when you want to move them outside of it, are effectively going to get converted automatically, you’re not going to pay attention into it, into some form of a stablecoin when it wants to go outside of that kind of like bank’s let’s call it like internal blockchain ledger, but still on still on chain. And it’s going to be used wherever, wherever somebody wants. And somebody is going to go pay for food and they’re going to pay a merchant.

And when they do that merchant pay, they’re just going to be scanning a QR code and they’re just going to send their USDC from, you know, the polygon wallet that they have. They don’t know it’s a polygon wallet to the polygon wallet that the merchant has that also won’t know it’s a wallet. mean, everyone will know at that point, they just won’t pay attention to it anymore. And you’re going to now just be, you know, transmitting funds the way you do today with one very big difference being if you are in an emerging economy or if you are sending money cross borders, you are going to be sending that money the same way it’s been feel the same as I send it to you using Venmo today in the US.

I don’t think me sending money to somebody on Venmo in the US is going to get any better than what he’s It’s fantastic. I think the idea that we need to make that better, I think, is ridiculous. We don’t need to. We need cross-border payments and payments for every other country in the world that doesn’t have that system to be just as good. And the interesting thing becomes, when it is just as good, the question then becomes, well, isn’t Venmo going to use the traditional system that it has today? And everybody else is going to use a blockchain-based system because that’s better.

And my answer to that is: Why would you support two systems when they’re just ones just as good as the other or better? You know, if you’re Venmo and you want to support cross-border payments, why are you going to support cross-border payments on Polygon and then support them on like traditional banking rails? It doesn’t actually make sense, especially when those banks are supporting Polygon or an internal ledger that can easily interoperate with Polygon. You won’t, they’ll just swap it out and you’ll use blockchains underneath. so it’s like to me in 10 years, it’s blockchains underneath. What blockchain that is, it’s going to depend on you’re dealing with, that they’ll all be interoperable and you’ll be sending money wherever it is, whether it’s in the US to somebody else in the US or in the US to somebody in Argentina or in Africa and somebody in Argentina who receives it in Argentina to somebody else at their local merchant will just be paying all of it on a blockchain.

PR: Wow, well that will be a very interesting way to transact and I look forward to the transition to get there. Marc, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. was a fascinating conversation.

MB: Thank you for having me.

PR: That is quite the vision that Mark just laid out. You know, I used to be skeptical of visionary statements like that because it always seemed that we were so far away from making this reality. But now I can see the traditional finance is embracing this technology and creating their own products with this vision in mind. By enabling access to tokenized assets from the likes of BlackRock and Franklin-Templeton, the yield opportunities, the seamless transactions, enterprises won’t need to constantly on-ramp and off-ramp, it will soon be possible for money to stay on chain.

This fundamentally different philosophy, building for an on-chain future rather than profiting from the friction of moving between worlds, is what Marc believes will ultimately win as tokenized deposits from major banks become the norm.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. Thanks so much for listening.