Sam Kazemian: The Neobank App Store Era Is Here

Sam Kazemian (0:00)

There will be a Frax DeFi card. It will not work the same way as other DeFi cards have worked.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

Just like the streets of Manhattan, I'm gonna keep this quick. Over 70% of our viewers are not subscribers. Yes, you. Every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in the financial industry. The easiest way to support our channel is to hit the like and smash the subscribe button. Now sit back, relax and enjoy today's show. Alrighty guys, we are back here with the final guest at Token 2049, DAS Asia, Sam. Sam, good to have you buddy.

Sam Kazemian (0:33)

Always great to be here.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

I'm a little bit jet lagged, but I'm still energized.

How's the event been so far? How's the week been?

Sam Kazemian (0:40)

It's been great. I also had a 22 hour total trip, so it's far getting out here. Always worth it. Token 2049, the organizers, Alex Fiskum, all of them there. Honestly, some of the best ever do it.

We've been coming for a few years, and I just saw an hour ago, they announced on Twitter, they're coming to New York in June 2027 So it's gonna be a huge one.

SPEAKER_2 (1:07)

It is, man. So Sam, we're obviously running our weekly show called Stabled Up and talking about stable coins, institutional assets on chain, tokenization. I was just there at the Hood Summit last week in Houston with the Robin Hood guys. They were, it seemed like the crowd was a little bit upset at the lack of kind of crypto news, but very clearly there's just this kind of massive sum of capital and allocators coming on chain, specifically bringing stable coins on chain. That open US dollar network launched. I think you all saw that a couple of days ago.

I believe they launched across a couple of chains and they're starting to see a little bit of traction. I wanted to kind of talk about where you think that these stable coins are actually going to end up living. So if you think about this kind of breadth of assets coming on chain, seems like stable coins have kind of been like the opening of the floodgates for the broader set of assets.

When you think about the actual life cycle or the existence of stable coins and tokenized assets on chain, I know it's kind of like a very open and in question, but how do you see those things actually existing on chain? Is it similar to crypto assets? Is it similar to the way that they exist in traditional financial system? How do tokenized assets actually end up having a life cycle of their own on chain?

Sam Kazemian (2:27)

Yeah, it's a good question because it's so white like Greenfield. No one's really been able to figure it out because it's so early. I saw the OpenUSD stuff. Frax is actually one of the consortium members. We have the ability to mint and redeem at zero vips. The interesting thing about it is that it's a payment type of stable coin, right? So they intend to take fees from how I understand it, based on payment volume, right? Because a lot of the payment companies, Stripe and then the others, MasterCard, Visa, they're all payments. So the flows rather than the stock of the currency is what gets them their main cash flow. I think the most valuable important thing for us at Frax is we're actually turning our FraxNet NeoBank platform into an app store. So it's actually going to be the first NeoBank with an app store. The reason for that is there's so many things going on, like you said, everyone, depending on what kind of user you are, whether you're, if you're retail or you do stable coin heavy transactions, or you just want to hold equities, RWAs, these kind of things, they all need slightly different flows, right? You need to be able to either mint or redeem, like equities, right, and hold them.

Or if you're a business that is using a NeoBank platform to accept pans and payouts of like stable coins and crypto, you need it to look slightly different. You need compliance, you need invoicing, you need accounting, you need balances. And so we haven't been able to build a one size fits all solution. No one has, right? If you look at like EtherFi's cards, right?

Athena's, Plasma's, right? All of these really popular cards, they're retail consumer oriented products, right? They are optimized for the consumer payment gateway, right? Like you, me, right? We want to buy stuff. We want to sell stuff. They're not optimized for a business accepting or doing anything with. In fact, the selling point is business doesn't even know they take stable coins. That's great, right? But at the end of the day, eventually, one thing that we're actually really interested about is eventually businesses will want to do something with digital assets rather than only go through Visa or MasterCard's or like only do that, right? And we've been, like we've said before, and getting close to announcing, we've been working with a few large ones.