The Future of Finance: Why Stablecoins Will Win! | Ryne Saxe

**Tony Edward** (0:26)
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Hey folks, welcome into The Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me today is Ryne Saxe, who is the co-founder and CEO of Eco, which connects digital asset markets through stable coins with programmable routing and predictable execution. Eco is backed by A16C Crypto and Founders Fund.
Ryne, great to have you.

**Ryne Saxe** (2:17)
Awesome to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation all morning.

**Tony Edward** (2:21)
Yeah.

**Ryne Saxe** (2:21)
Let's do it.

**Tony Edward** (2:22)
Ryne, lots happening in the stable coin market with tokenization and much more, so excited to learn about Eco and what you guys are doing.
I think it's a very good time for us to be talking because there's a lot of the US government agencies that are looking to get the Genius Act implemented. You're seeing banks talking about they want to launch their own stable coins and much more. But let's kick it off with your background. Where do we hail from?
How did you make your way into crypto?

**Ryne Saxe** (2:48)
Okay. So originally from the rural Midwest, Southern Illinois and Indiana, my family lives on two sides of a river. So I claim both states. One side Illinois, one side Indiana. Love where I grew up. I try to get back there as often as I possibly can.
I went to University of Alabama for college, studied physics, studied math, started a physics grad degree, bailed on it because I felt like I was narrowing down my career path a little too quickly and I ended up on the West Coast. Where do you go? When you want to explore and broaden your horizons, you go West. So I ended up, after a couple of years in the West Coast, went to Stanford for law school and I've been here ever since, which is a surprise to me. I thought I was coming to law school to do three years in the Bay Area and then probably moving on somewhere else and 15, 16 years later, I'm still here.
I just love the energy of the place. I'm a builder at heart and even during law school and after law school, thought I got to start a company and that's what we've ended up doing. How to get into crypto, discovered crypto.
I was at law school and at Stanford during the years where crypto emerged from the dark forest. And it was the cryptographers, the first years in law school and then general developers started to latch on to it, and the second years in law school, and then the business school people heard about it, and the third year I was in law school. And so it really came out of the Internet forums and more into the mainstream, at least among the early enthusiasts during those days. I thought it was really intellectually interesting because into the theory of money and economics and the math and the cryptography, and it played on all of those interests. And I set it aside after nerding out on it for a little bit. I set it aside when I went to work for a couple years, and it came back around after Ethereum launched and started to gain a lot of traction and a lot of attention. And I thought, I have to work in this space. The only way to keep up with this space, this is inevitably better money technology. The only way to keep up with it is to actually work in it. And so I left my legal job. I felt like I had done sort of well and seen enough there, and eventually one thing led to another and we started Eco.