Dan Romero: How Stablecoin Growth Is Setting The Stage For An Explosive Bull Market (Bull Case)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

What's up, guys? Welcome back to The Rollup here. Special episode, we are coming at you. We're going to bring on Dan Romero to talk about stablecoins at scale. Dan is the head of GoToMarket at Tempo. I'm sure you guys are very familiar with Tempo, obviously out of Stripe.

But Dan, in particular, he co-founded Farcaster. He was an early Coinbase executive before joining Tempo in February, and he calls stablecoins a generational opportunity. We certainly agree with that. So we're going to bring up Dan to talk about Tempo, the layer one built specifically for stablecoin payments. Again, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, accounts MasterCard, UBS, and Colshe among its design partners with Klarna, planning to issue a stablecoin on the network. His public argument this year is that crypto has settled into a barbell. We've been talking about the barbell a lot on this show.

And with speculation on one end and stablecoin payments on the other, and that payments companies want purpose-built chains rather than general-purpose networks competing with trading activity, huge, huge opportunities at stake here. Everyone's battling for stablecoin dominance. Let's go ahead, bring up Dan Romero, get into stablecoins at scale. Dan, welcome to the show, man.

Dan Romero (1:13)

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (1:14)

Absolutely. How are you feeling given that we have a trillion-dollar opportunity? And I believe Treasury Secretary Betheny calls it a $3 trillion opportunity and quite literally feels like a national economic priority in order to finance countries at large with the issuance of stablecoins. It's a massive opportunity.

So how does it feel to work on this thing day in and day out?

Dan Romero (1:36)

I'm really excited. I've been in crypto for over a decade, spent the first five years at Coinbase, spent five years on Farcaster.

You might call that Web 3 And the shift to stablecoins has been, frankly, refreshing.

After struggling to figure out if consumers are kind of interested in Web 3, I think we saw a lot of excitement around NFTs for a bit, and then that kind of waned. But stablecoins, I've just been up and to the right over the last few years, obviously Stripe bought Bridge. And then I think the kind of marquee thing and the real momentum started to really pick up after the Genius Act passed last year. And to your point, I think the US government is leaning into stablecoins. And that is an opportunity for the country to have global digital dollar dominance, basically. And I think people talk about reserve currency and all that kind of jazz. But the reality is a world where stablecoins proliferate is very good for the US dollar. Because if you talk to enterprises around the world or consumers, the stablecoin that they want to hold is a dollar denominated stablecoin.

SPEAKER_1 (2:40)

Yeah, absolutely. The dollar has been the global reserve asset, as you mentioned. It's the primary export of the United States. So it feels like it's critical infrastructure for the global economy. And now, to your point, we're modernizing that, upgrading it so it's a digital dollar.

Before we get into some of the nuts and bolts around Tempo, what you guys have done in terms of the design choices that you've made to make this primarily purpose-built for stablecoins, I just want to stress test or pressure test the thesis, our stablecoin thesis that we've been talking about on the show. You spend a lot of time thinking about stablecoins. And what we've been talking about is how, obviously, the national economic priority thing, as they're twisting the duration into the short end. But the idea is that there needs to be a structure buyer of short-term treasury bills and stablecoin issuers can be that buyer. Do you truly believe that we're going to see stablecoin issuing companies step up as one of the primary buyers of US treasuries in light of other sovereign nations moving away and repatriating their capital? Do you think stablecoin issuers can fill that void?

Dan Romero (3:48)

Well, I don't know if it's just stablecoin issuers filling the void, but I think if you step back, the fact that now you have a kind of easily accessible digital dollar, kind of on these globally available, instant, permissionless blockchains, I think is a really important step in terms of creating a kind of global consumer market for earned programs, right? So I think it started with DeFi and kind of quote DGEN's playing around with meme coins, but the same technology, right? The kind of morphos and aves of the world are now able to provide kind of this foundational infrastructure for enterprises that want to kind of say, hey, I'm a global marketplace and I've got a million contractors. I can now have an embedded stable coin wallet. I can do my payments, which we're going out on fiat rails before, in stable coins, so instant, global, cheap, and then have that wallet have an earned program that you can turn around and earn 4%, 5% anywhere in the world, right? If you live in Argentina, your access to dollars is one thing, but getting access to dollars and then a solid, think of it as like savings account effectively, in terms of the ability to earn some amount of yield, that's a new phenomenon for the average person.