Bridge CEO Zach Abrams: Stablecoins Are The Next Platform for Money

**Zach Abrams** (0:00)
I don't think it takes like that much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that in five years or ten years, the overwhelming majority of the payments that happen in the world just by sheer number of payments are happening via stablecoins and predominantly happening between non-human agents. What are all the things that need to be built when the velocity of money goes from x to 10x or 100x? What's all the subsequent infrastructure that needs to be built around to support those use cases? It feels like it's coming.

**Robert Hackett** (0:34)
Zach, thank you for being here.

**Zach Abrams** (0:35)
Excited to be here.

**Robert Hackett** (0:36)
What is your pitch to people who are not in crypto, who maybe don't get crypto, don't understand it, don't care about it so much? How do you describe what you're doing and the value that you provide?

**Zach Abrams** (0:45)
I think of stablecoins as an evolution of financial services. You know, the last evolution of fintech was a lot of companies building on top of cards. Cards were this new form factor for money that enabled money to move much differently than it could before. Cards sort of changed the way that, you know, commerce happens and a lot of the companies that were successful in fintech were building on the back of cards, those stripes and squares and audience and so on. And stablecoins are sort of the next evolution of money. They're sort of just like cards, they're a new form factor of money. And just like cards enable a whole new set of capabilities with money, you know, that can be moved cross border very cheaply, it can be programmed, it's natively yield bearing, it can be moved in very small increments. And just like cards, it will evolve to enable a whole bunch of new money applications. And we're starting to see that today.

**Robert Hackett** (1:38)
A lot of people forget this, but in the early days of credit cards, it reminds me of the early days of the crypto industry. You know, there was a lot of bad, bad, bad headlines. You know, people were air dropping these things all over the place to people who had terrible, you know, they didn't know they had terrible credit, but they found out that they did. And there was all of this fraud. And it was a really tough go. And actually, there was a whole moral panic around them, too. Like senators were saying, this is going to cause people to get into debt they can't get out of. And now today, you fast forward decades later, and the whole system is based on cards.

**Zach Abrams** (2:12)
Exactly. I mean, there was the same adverse selection dynamic of, you know, OK, who's going to use cards? Only the people who can't pay for things. Then there was a similar view of, like, who's using, you know, stable coins and crypto assets, or only people who can't access other financial services and financial rails. And in both of those cases, the card effectively, you know, grew over a 10, 15 year period and scaled sequentially into more and more and more use cases, but really accelerated when this other sort of big change happened in the world, which was, you know, the internet. And we all use cards before the internet, but, you know, it wasn't the same as it is now. And I think the same thing will be true with stable coins. You know, stable coins enable all these applications today, but we are like just scratching the surface of what is possible. And with AI and agentic payments emerging, I think that the same thing will happen where this platform, this sort of one technology platform, will accelerate this financial services platform and vice versa.

**Robert Hackett** (3:18)
So there was a time during this adoption phase, people were afraid to enter their credit card numbers on the internet. They thought that it would, you know, you'd get all your data stolen, and people would drain your bank account or something. When it comes to stable coins and where we're at now, what are the challenges toward, you know, obviously they're being adopted quite strongly across the board, but are there any obstacles or hurdles to overcome to really fully make it the next platform that everybody uses?

**Zach Abrams** (3:43)
I mean, it's hard to overstate just how early we still are. Bridge started three and a half years ago. We launched our APIs two and a half years ago. We were, you know, one of, if not the first company to build APIs that enable the companies to build stable coin applications. So then, definitionally, that means that there's sort of only been, you know, companies building a lot of these stable coin applications for two and a half, three years. We're, like, just at the very beginning of figuring out, you know, all the applications that can and should be built on top of this stable coin platform. And as a result, you know, we're just the beginning of figuring out what infrastructure needs to be built to support all this. An example for that for us is, like, our product itself has evolved very wildly over the last two years as we've moved from, you know, early developers who are using the product, like, you know, our first customer was Zulu, which was moving money cross-border and everything was, like, kind of manual and we were sending, like, two or three payments a day to then shifting to the US government that was sending aid payments and sending thousands of payments sequentially, which required a whole new set of infrastructure to be built. And then to banks and, like, large scale financial institutions, which then require a whole new set of regulatory infrastructure and messaging systems to confirm payments and rebalancing of treasuries.