Bitcoin In Every Brokerage Account CHANGES EVERYTHING - Caroline Pham

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
Caroline Pham, the former CFTC commissioner, now leading MoonPay's institutional push, says crypto has roughly two and a half years to become too big to fail, and the numbers prove it.
Stablecoins did $28 trillion in volume in a single quarter, dwarfing Visa and MasterCard combined. Tokenized repo is hitting $10 trillion every month. In 2026, she says, is officially the year of institutional adoption.

**Caroline Pham** (0:24)
I came out, I think January 2nd or January 3rd, and I said, 2026 is gonna be the year of institutional adoption. Carolyn, why are you saying that? Because I've been working on it since 2018

**Scott Melker** (0:33)
In this conversation, the woman who built America's first digital asset taxonomy breaks down what MoonPay Institutional actually means for every bank and asset manager on earth.

**Caroline Pham** (0:42)
JP Morgan, for example, they have spent years building their own proprietary tech stacks that have on-chain capabilities. But if you're now just coming to the game because now you realize you actually are allowed to do so, how are you gonna get up to speed? If you have an infrastructure partner who can deliver for you blockchain in a box and it's turnkey, that's what everybody wants.

**Scott Melker** (1:01)
Why the DeFi is incompatible with KYC narrative is a complete fallacy.

**Caroline Pham** (1:05)
MoonPay has been doing KYC AML since it was founded in 2019 That's on non-custodial wallets. 30 million users, 180 countries. It works. It's possible.

**Scott Melker** (1:14)
What the real convergence between TradFi and DeFi looks like at scale?

**Caroline Pham** (1:17)
All of these major institutions have been investing, at this point in time, it's billions of dollars across the industry. This is a whole scale upgrade of financial pipes and plumbing.

**Scott Melker** (1:30)
And why a Bitcoin and every brokerage account changes the game forever. Let's go.
How many shows are you doing? How many of these are you doing while you're here?

**Caroline Pham** (1:53)
Ask Casey. I just go where she tells me. Casey's actually my boss.

**Scott Melker** (1:58)
She's secretly your boss.

**Caroline Pham** (2:00)
Yeah, Casey's bossing it up.

**Scott Melker** (2:01)
All right, get her a third chair. Let's go.
So you're having more fun in the crypto industry than you were the CFTC, or is that the real party over there?

**Caroline Pham** (2:11)
No comment.

**Scott Melker** (2:14)
Well, what has that transition been like for you? I mean, it's a pretty stark difference, I would imagine, in your day-to-day.

**Caroline Pham** (2:21)
Honestly, for me, the hardest transition going to the private sector was Slack. I hate Slack with a passion.

**Scott Melker** (2:28)
I love Slack.

**Caroline Pham** (2:29)
It reminds me of AOL Instant Messenger, when you used to have all the different tabs that would be different conversations. So I'm trying to figure out, how do I get back to this DM that I had, or where is this channel? So the Slack is, I'm four months in, and the Slack is still very challenging. The other thing that I really hate is, I do not like Google Mail, or Google Docs, or Google Slides, because I'm sorry, I'm like a Microsoft Office 98 person. I like my Word and my PowerPoint.

**Scott Melker** (3:02)
You know, you get like, it becomes so habitual, the shortcuts and the keys and once you change it.

**Caroline Pham** (3:08)
It's hysterical because I'm at the cutting edge of like, DeFi blockchain technology, and then I'm like, PowerPoint.

**Scott Melker** (3:15)
Yeah, you're one of us. But you described me to a T. I couldn't make a PowerPoint presentation. Thank god I could just ChatGPT like a prompt now and ask.

**Caroline Pham** (3:24)
They tried to tell me, they're like, no, no, no. Just make slides off Nano Banana. I'm like, excuse me, what?

**Scott Melker** (3:31)
That's literally not a real thing. We got Nano Banana with our LED screen. It was part of the package. I've never used Nano Banana.

**Caroline Pham** (3:39)
I was like, no, no, I'm good.

**Scott Melker** (3:42)
So you've been in the role now for a few months. I'm sure you're getting comfortable. What's the main focus? That's obviously MoonPay Institutional is launching. I've got to imagine that that's a big project for you.

**Caroline Pham** (3:54)
That is super fun. I've been really excited to launch MoonPay Institutional. But even taking a step back for me, coming to MoonPay was really seeing this vision that our founder and CEO Ivan Soto Wright had, and Keith Grossman, our president, who's a dear friend of mine, which was about really creating the future of an operating system for value. So think about it. Right now, with our Google Surge, with any kind of AI chatbot that you're using, you can just type what you want to do into a chat box and then be able to do it. Well, with Agentic Payments, which we launched with MoonPay agents a couple weeks ago, and with all the capabilities that we're bringing together, why shouldn't you be able to interact with your money the same way, or your value the same way, by just typing what you want to do in just natural language and having that work. So this is something that's really exciting, seeing that all come together, but underneath the hood of all of that is having a really robust tech infrastructure platform that is compliant, that does comply with regulations, that has KYC AML, and so kind of bringing that vision together about how do we take where MoonPay started with its roots in 2019 being DeFi, being non-custodial, scaling to like 30 million users in 180 countries, where you can do settlement in 120 fiat currencies. I actually was going away when I found that out.