Stablecoins, Tokenization & the Future of Banking with Adam Nelson of FirstMark Capital

**Dan Nathan** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
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**Adam Nelson** (1:33)
I think that you're going to have this world where AI creates a lot of the user interfaces that we interact with in terms of whether it's a banking app or an ERP and everything in between.
It's going to be the coordination layer of how payments get affected. And I think that the stable coin rails are going to be the means through which that value is delivered. So I think this is like, it's not going to be tomorrow, it's not going to be the next day, but I think five, ten years from now, you're going to wake up and everything we know about the financial system is going to look entirely different.

**Dan Nathan** (2:14)
All right, welcome back to OK Computer. I'm Dan Nathan. I'm joined by Adam Nelson. He is a partner at FirstMark Capital. He leads FinTech Investments here. Adam, welcome back to the podcast.

**Adam Nelson** (2:23)
It's great to be back. It's been a minute.

**Dan Nathan** (2:24)
It's been three years, actually, which is way too long. It's many, many two minutes here, and I'm really glad to be able to sit down now because it seems like there's so many interesting things going on in FinTech. In summer of 2023, I mean, we were really coming out of the throes of a bear market in the public markets. I mean, I think you and I talked about it at the time, and many of my friends in VC, you know, they were talking about a lag that exists to the public markets. Usually, it's like, what, 9 to 12 months or something like that. And, you know, your focus at the time, I know you were thinking about DeFi, and I know that was a big theme, you know, in the lead up to, let's call it the bear market in 2022 But a lot of things have kind of come to fruition in that regard. It took a little bit of time. And so I'd love for you just to kind of talk a little bit about some of the things that you're focused on, how that's changed over the last few years, because a lot of investments that people were making in the private markets back in 2020, 2021, some have worked out fabulously and others have been, you know, they've been laggards, if you will.

**Adam Nelson** (3:25)
Yeah. Yeah, well, I think if kind of looking back retrospectively, and now that we're experiencing like real profound platform shifts, which we should talk through, but obviously AI is one, we believe that stable coins and tokenized real world assets are another. I think looking back, a lot of the innovation that was driving the last cycle had kind of been delivered to the market in the mid-20 teens. And I think a lot of the growth that you saw was in one place, like delivering that in a bunch of different categories. And obviously, in fintech, that really looked like neobanking and kind of spend management and all this stuff on the B2B side. And I think that kind of with the benefit of a hide site, the thing to have done in 2023 was just to look at the winners who had been built in the back half of the 2010s and just continue to double and triple down on them. Because those are the businesses, the stripes, the revolutes of the world, even emerging companies like Ramp.