Esther Wong (Cashi) on Making Stablecoins Spendable

Matt Walsh (0:00)

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Esther Wong, the founder and CEO of Cashi.

Cashi is a stable coin spending app and cash back card that lets you hold, send and spend money globally. In this conversation, we discuss the growth of the stable coin market, use cases in the AI economy, and the future of stable coin layer one blockchains. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Esther from Cashi.

SPEAKER_2 (0:25)

Matt Walsh and Nic Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

SPEAKER_3 (0:46)

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

SPEAKER_4 (0:51)

The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep.

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The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

SPEAKER_6 (1:06)

The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

SPEAKER_2 (1:11)

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

Esther Wong (1:17)

Bitcoin.

Matt Walsh (1:19)

Well Esther, thank you for joining us on The Brink.

Esther Wong (1:21)

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Matt Walsh (1:23)

Would love to just hop right in. Obviously we're going to talk a lot about stable coins today, but tell us a little bit about Cashi and how you came to launch this business.

Esther Wong (1:31)

So maybe a bit about myself. And I think that leads right into how Cashi is formed. I'm from Hong Kong and Singapore. I spent around 17 years in finance, the last 10 years specifically on cut payments. So for my past two gigs is both in startups. I joined quite early. One is a payment startup called U-Trip. They are a multi-currency card in Singapore, and the other one is crypto.com, helping them launch the card seven years ago.

So Cashi, the concept of Cashi is something that I have been thinking about for a long time. Ever since two years ago, where people started to use stable coins. And given my role, I actually worked with a lot of payment companies, for example, Visa, MasterCard. And we see this adoption, these institutions changing the infrastructure, changing how they settle with stable coins. So I started to look more into it. As I go deeper, I started to talk to different users. And the use cases, what me and you would not really imagine in our everyday life. In Singapore, for example, we have a very sophisticated financial system. It's very easy to have access to money. But for some users, it's actually not that easy. And stable coin is their solution.

So the more I look into it, the more I believe that it's actually the right time to go all in into this concept and building for what I believe are a very unique use case for this group of users. So that's how I began to conceptualize about what Cashi can be. And I started it this year.

And we are now in public beta, launching features every week and looking forward to seeing it grow. And hopefully we get the adoption we hoped for.

Matt Walsh (3:12)

I'm always fascinated by the concept of jobs to be done. So I'm really curious when you look at your customer set, what are the real world problems that you're solving for them using stable coins?

Esther Wong (3:22)

So we have hypothesis from user interviews, like different people in a team actually had different personal experiences. So we have hypothesis. And I wanted to start off with this hypothesis because there will be a side of the story where we prove them right or wrong. So we came in thinking that a lot of freelancers, content creators around the world, like Digital Nomads, would find this product really useful because they are getting paid in either US dollar or stable coins. They might not have a bank account, and even if they have a bank account, they are subject to high bank fees and the latencies.