Stablecoin special: Zach Abrams (Bridge) and Henri Stern (Privy)

**John** (0:00)
Stablecoins are the biggest financial innovation happening right now, so I invited two experts for a pint. Zach Abrams, founder of Bridge, the leading stablecoin orchestration platform, and Henri Stern, the founder of Privy, the leading crypto wallet infrastructure. Both these companies recently joined Stripe via acquisitions, and they're in the thick of helping both crypto companies and regular companies build with stablecoins.

**Henri Stern** (0:20)
Cheers.

**John** (0:24)
Okay. Lots to talk about with both Bridge and Privy. I realized with Bridge, when you started it, it was 2023 Was that like at the very nadir of the doom loop for crypto?

**Zach Abrams** (0:35)
We started right before then. So we started right when it was interesting, which maybe made it worse.

**John** (0:41)
Which is funny.

**Zach Abrams** (0:43)
You did not know it was going to be horrible. This was, it wasn't 2023 is when we launched our APIs, it was 2022 is when we started, Sean and I started the company and raised money. And then immediately after we raised money, Terra Luna happened. And then the whole space was nuked and then FTX happened and it was nuked again.

**John** (1:02)
Okay, so remind me of the vibes here. Like, 2022 was still like that was pre-FTX.

**Zach Abrams** (1:10)
Pre-FTX, the things were going really well. It was before like when the Ukraine War happened, the whole sort of economy started to shift. And it was before that, VC funding was really high. And then by June, it was gone. Everywhere was, everything had, most of the space had evaporated, but especially in the crypto space. And at the time, to mark this in crypto years, when we started the company, the first idea we had was using your bank account to acquire NFTs. So it was the NFT phase of the crypto.

**Henri Stern** (1:49)
The carbon dating of the company.

**Zach Abrams** (1:51)
Yes. And that's where almost all the volume was, was NFT drops.

**Henri Stern** (1:57)
The other thing I was going to say just about Bridge's beginnings is we had an early all-hands at Privy, where it was a lunch and learn and one of our teammates, Max, worked with Zach Friar.

**Zach Abrams** (2:08)
Yeah.

**Henri Stern** (2:08)
So Zach came to pitch Bridge to Privy.

**Zach Abrams** (2:11)
Yeah.

**Henri Stern** (2:11)
He was like, we're going to work on stablecoins. And we were like, what is this guy talking about? This is not a market. It does not exist.

**Zach Abrams** (2:17)
Well, on our side, when the NFT market blew up, our initial product went away. And we were sort of pivoting around to try to figure out what we wanted to do. One of our first ideas was to build wallets as a service, which was obviously your business. At the time, I don't think that you, maybe you existed, but at least it wasn't, you weren't on our radar at all. And I remember looking at the space and being like, no, that's a tar pit.
There's nothing for us to build there. It's so deeply competitive. And then we quickly moved on and went our way to stablecoins. And so for me, looking back at like, you went through the exact same thing, saw that same idea, saw that same opportunity. And it was like, yes, this is the thing. It obviously built something really good there.

**John** (3:06)
And so how do you describe CrossBridge does today to people?

**Zach Abrams** (3:10)
We enable developers to build with stablecoins. And it could be anything they want to build. So we help folks like SpaceX use stablecoins to move money cross-border. We help folks like Dollar App build neobanks on top of stablecoins. We help folks like Felix Pago build cross-border payments experiences with stablecoins. We help treasurers rebalance their internal funds with stablecoins. Stablecoins are sort of this broad payment platform on top of which a bunch of new payment experiences can be built. And we build APIs to let people use it.

**John** (3:41)
I want to come back to all those use cases, but maybe first to catch up. So how about Privy? Where in the crypto hype and then bust and then re-hype cycle did you guys start Privy?

**Henri Stern** (3:51)
Peak hype. I'd worked in crypto prior and I came out of that experience thinking this space is incredible. We have these rails that can be used to codify ownership on the web in a way that hasn't been possible before, but also no one cares about building products that people actually want to use. And so this is an endless space where we will work on protocols, but never actually, no offense to protocols, which I think are deeply useful, but only if they get carried through all the way to utility.