Stephen: I know what you've been thinking. We couldn't possibly do another episode on stable coins, but with so much heat going on, especially in the US around stable coins, the Trump administration, the genius and clarity acts, it is important to have these conversations.

And today we have Ryne Saxe, CEO of Eco talking all about Fiat, the stablecoins. We go deep into what he was doing prior to joining the cryptocurrency industry. At such an early adoption stage, we talk about eco and where it's going in the industry. We talk about protocols and liquidity providers, everything you need to know, and a whole bunch of new topics and terms like native routes, eco accounts, crowd liquidity, things that you need to know if you're gonna be jumping into this industry, whether you're in traditional finance.

FinTech or even operating crypto business. This is probably one of the better episodes to listen to around the nuances of stable coins and the new infrastructure that is taking over the way we do payments and how we know it today. Let me know if you enjoy this episode and we'll see you next week.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargent around the Coin Podcast. We are going stable ish. We're getting into stablecoin infrastructure and talking about payments in the crypto space with Ryne Saxe, the CEO of Eco. Ryne, you were at Stanford Law. I found this really interesting. Ryne, you're at Stanford Law you spend a lot of time in D School. What's that? You even jokingly say on your LinkedIn that you probably know more about D School than actual law. I went on the D School website. Looks like this is a place for collaboration, tech, technology inspiration. Maybe break that down for people that don't know about D School and Stanford.

Ryne: Oh, nice. That's a, that's a, that's a fun first question. Thanks for having me on Stephen, this is gonna be a fun conversation. Judging, judging from that first one. So, yeah. I went to law school at, at Stanford. I actually, the main reason I went there is because it's way less structured kind of law, law, school experience than most.

And so they don't really do, they don't do GPAs. They don't do sort of affirmative class ranking and they let you roam all over the university. Right. And so it's a really unique take on just kind of like not only legal, legal education, but sort of a willingness to be kind of cross-disciplinary. So I took full advantage of that.

I wanted to, I wanted to go to Stanford. Obviously it's a great school, but I wanted to go there so I could roam quite a bit. So I spent a lot of time at the business school and I spent a lot of time at the D school and even some time in uh, the physics department. 'cause that had been my, my major and my grad school track before.

So I still nerded out on some stuff there. And the cool thing about Stanford D School is pretty unique. Is is just like this insanely kind of, creatively structured multidisciplinary. Set of classes, many of which only exist one time uh, that are, that are intended to sort of like come at pretty abstract concepts from pretty abstract, abstract directions.

Some are sort of like literally like physical play. Some are like physical product design. Some are just like much more conceptual sort of heuristics about, you know, that might be relevant to product design um, or industrial design in some way. And so it's a really cool way to, to stretch your brain. It's a really cool way to have fun, I think in, in doing so.

And for me legal education was great, but it's like a system and a lot of times I wanted to, like, my broader interests were like, led me to like, want to get outside that system for at least a couple hours a week and I could get credit for doing so. And so, I tended to to be around the D School a lot.

When I was there you know, I took a course about sort of the design of money. Which ended up being sort of somewhat nerdy, relevant to, to sort of interest in crypto. I took a course about automotive design. I took a course about sort of like psychological empathy frameworks and how those might feed into user experience flows, all kinds of arbitrary stuff.

So, that was fun. It's a lot of fun.

Stephen: That's super interesting. It's funny, I was just going on a walk and I was listening to a podcast and it was one of the, you know, early, I think he's the CEO now of Shopify saying how you went to McGill University. 'cause there was a professor there says, you know, if you really want to get into business, come to law.

Even if you don't plan to become a lawyer, it's really helpful for business. What are your thoughts now? 'cause you kind of went into law maybe not playing to be a lawyer, I'm not sure, but now that you're in business, have you felt that was beneficial for you?

Ryne: Somewhat, but I think it's less related to law school itself and more related to what I did afterward. And also maybe because I, I did take a bunch of business school courses while I was in law school. 'cause I had the freedom to do so. I was sort of like, um, a little bit of a, a square peg round hole here.

I never wanted to go to law school. It was suggested often to me when I was an undergrad, and it was like the last of my choices about carrying on. And one thing led to another couple year, like, you know, I, I, left my physics grad program because it was narrowing me down. I like a little bit too, too quickly on a particular dissertation and discipline, and then a couple years of doing other things in between.

And suddenly law school, you know, made sense as surprising to me as anyone else. And I chose Stanford for the reasons that, that I talked about b before it was really the, the, the main or the only one I was interested in attending if I hadn't got in, I, I don't know uh, what I'd be doing right now. And I think what was most impactful. Was being able to sort of, roam in learning and probably the business network around Stanford in terms of both the GSB and the technical community and the VC community. I think sort of learning that language and seeing why and how deals are done, including with a couple years of practice I went into afterward was probably way more relevant.

And so I think, you know, from my own perspective, maybe it was a, it, it's a little more idiosyncratic. I don't know if I would make the same generalization that if you wanna learn business, go to law school. I don't know if that value prop is as strong, honestly as it used to be. I just think it matters kind of like what community your, your, your legal education throws you into or exposes you to, and then you know, what can you, what can you learn quote unquote on the job from there?

That would be, that's been my experience anyway.

Stephen: What do you think your, the value prop is of school? Like college universities? It's been two decades since you've been in school, but you're also hiring people and working with entrepreneurial professionals. What are your thoughts? Is, is university you think still important or for certain trades? Like, I'm curious for someone that went to a very high level school and now someone that's an entrepreneur, do you see the benefits of school the way it was maybe 20 years ago?

And that was usually one of the few options you had to, was to, you know, everyone's parents wanted them to be in some kind of post secondary education.

Ryne: Yeah, that's a, I think that's a super timely question. And that question has layers, right? We could peel that one back, I think quite a bit. I'll start by saying I do not think that the standard track of go get your degree after high school, build your career on that degree is as fail safe as it once was.

Right. Like that was the very, there was a very linear set of assumptions that I think worked across a couple generations and I don't think that it's so safe to assume that anymore uh, for a few reasons. One is that we just inflated education massively, and so I, you know, does, does, does sort of like, is the expected value there based on the expense?

I don't know. Uh, We've inflated certain sort of professional and job markets massively. So is there the guaranteed job on the other side that there used to be 20, 30 years ago? It seems like not. We've hollowed out a bunch of trades that seem to be important still to economic success and productivity, and it seems like we need to backfill a lot of those trades in ways that might not demand a traditional kind of four year degree.

And then you just like have the sort of like the. You know, the, the sort of reality of AI looming and all the unanswered questions about how that is going to impact the job market in different ways uh, where it's gonna unlock it, where it's going to replace it. And, you know, there's, there's a lot to hedge there.

And so, in my opinion the value of continuing education is learning to think in particular ways to relate to the world in broader ways. And what kind of network is it gonna throw you into. That's, you know, that that's, those three things in my experience, have been way more relevant than what I actually studied, and I love what I studied, but ultimately is those three things that I think are like the more qualitative value props to continuing education that I think are probably like asymmetric longer term bets.

Stephen: You know, you brought up, you know, the merger and acquisitions. You were working at a firm, you know, doing Tech m and as you know. Is there anything memorable about that time? I think around that time was like Amazon was acquiring Whole Foods. Google acquired Nest. Dell acquired EMC. I think Google acquired Nest and DeepMind, but I think they sold off DeepMind since then, if I remember correctly.

What are some of the things that you remember them around? It came to mergers, acquisitions, especially in the tech space.

Ryne: Yeah, there, there was a few, that's a fun question too. So I was lucky, my, my kind of like ideal plan kind of worked out. I, I, I did not think that I was like in it for the long term on a legal career or a law firm career, but I did want to go to a law firm and have a practice that overlap with a lot of my sort of non-legal interests and like, you know, see, see the way the world works, so to speak.

And so I went to a law firm. Called Wild Gul, great firm. If I wanted to, if I wanted to stay in law long term, I'd probably still be there. Um, Because the firm is awesome and they're really prominent on uh, they've been really successful as a New York based firm opening a long time ago in the dotcom era, a west coast office that has really prominent sort of buy-side tech clientele.

And so I went to do m and a there, usually on the buy side for bigger tech companies, buying smaller tech companies. And it was a really busy stretch. Turns out it's, it's pretty much stayed that way for the last decade. A couple blips on the radar, but saw a lot in, in the few years that I was there, and that just meant that I, I was able to, to pattern match and learn more quickly.

So a couple things that are interesting right at the start, Facebook bought WhatsApp, obviously like a seminal acquisition in this community. I wasn't directly on that team, but I did a lot of the trailing work. The people who were directly on that team. Had an insane week of sort of living, eating and sleeping in a war room, conference room bridging Valentine's Day to make that deal happen all in one week because it was very competitive in the background.

And so there's a lot of trailing work from that. That was really interesting. You know, why the hell is Facebook want WhatsApp? What do they intend to do here? That's what's for the deals you hear about and the deals that never happened that we're flirted with. That was what was super interesting about being in that seat, is you get to see a couple years down the road on like a buy side company's product pipeline.

We, we represent Apple, for example. So they're doing all these acquisitions because it's going to turn into a feature for the iPhone, right? So they buy a fingerprint reader or they do something in computer vision to get ahead of their AR kit, et cetera. That's interesting stuff to me. And so that was cool.

Uh, Maybe the last, the last thing that I'll, I'll highlight, there are a couple deals. I, I guess I'll probably. Can't, can't talk anything about that we're flirted with that would've been real market movers. And it was just interesting to see why those even got going and then what made them stop before they ultimately, um, turned into something.

But one, one thing that was really interesting that I think is highly relevant right now is that while I was there, Intel bought a company called Alter and it was just like a deep semiconductor deal. And Intel sort of, there's their semiconductors are sort of like built or based on, on two or three fundamental technologies.

Intel was really good and one of them, Alterra was really good than another. So it was sort of a synergistic tech platform play for them. But what was fascinating about this deal is neither of them make most of their own semiconductors. You know, the semiconductor pipeline has become more and more newsworthy in recent years as we've gone through export controls and sort of the CHIPS act, et cetera.

And I think maybe more technical people, uh, in the audience might understand that most semiconductors, even if they're designed in the US, are made by TSMC and Taiwan. And both Intel and Alterra were customers of TSMC and the most, this is like national security stuff. Like this is just so interesting to me.

The most sensitive detail in that acquisition was that Alterra had a master agreement with TSMC that they naturally did not want Intel to be privy to. Because if the deal fell through for whatever reason, they did not want that business intelligence to be internalized. And a potential competitor.

And that agreement was a physical agreement typed on a typewriter that was, you know, a, a master agreement that was a couple decades old. Uh, And the way that, you know, it is just a different way of doing business. You start out with a master agreement and every year you sort of revisit it relative to your new product lines.

And TSS Z is new capabilities and new staple, you know, a new, a new set of terms to it. But it could not be uploaded in a shared data room and it could not be divulged to the buyer. And so you have this sort of physical agreement that only a handful of intermediary attorneys have access to in order to do the diligence they need to do.

You know, if it impacts any of the legal terms of the deal, but the business sides can't actually review it. And that's just a fast, that's just like fascinating thing, right? This thing you're never aware of or in, in terms of a really important market in business relationship in the world. And, you know, I think details like that in terms of learning and having the, about the way a business is, is conducted and, and having some awareness of that was a really interesting element of the practice that I took away from it. So that would be, that would be sort of a fun one that I'd point out from, from that era.

Stephen: That's a major deal, right? That agreement is like what makes the whole deal. I'm assuming that it makes that whole deal kind of fly. I'm curious, you mentioned the lull that we had here in, well, I'm in Canada, but based in the US at Lull in merger and acquisitions. Some people play, you know, put that on the, the shoulders of certain people in, in the government.

But we have seen some recent acquisitions. We're gonna talk a little bit more about Stripe acquiring, not just Bridge, but they're also acquired, I believe it's pronounced Privy or Privy. And, you know, Ripple's bid for pre IPO circle, which was super interesting. Do you think m and a is finally back?

Is this a good thing for industry? Is this a good thing for crypto or is it just the hype of stablecoins that has, you know, VCs and other bigger, larger enterprises going after any player in the game while there's still a chance?

Ryne: Yeah, I, I think m and a is coming back pretty quickly in so far as I can kind of just temp check the market. I think naturally there was a lull as there was post COVID, and then there was sort of some reorganization of trade policy and export controls. And more broadly that probably confused m and a for a bit.

Government reviews took longer. Within crypto in particular though, I think it's going to be the biggest m and a boom we've ever seen. It may already be. I think there's a couple reasons for that. Infra development's been really good over the last couple years. There's a bunch of really legit teams building good stuff.

It's not all gonna work in, in sort of mainstream distribution. And so there's a lot of opportunities to pick up good teams that have built very legit tech, but just didn't really like find a way to get it to market sustainably. There's gonna be quite a bit of activity there, I think coming outta the last couple years of crypto development as the market heats up.

And then you have just like this market meta around stablecoins and it's very relevant and it bridges traditional finance payments and crypto development alike. And so I think what you see, and Stripe was kind of, in front here, but they're just a harbinger in my opinion. You'll see kind of quote unquote web two or FinTech companies that feel like they need to catch up to this sort of stablecoin market and meta and technology looking to acquire their way into a, a leadership position there.

And it's relatable technology, right? It it's pretty relatable technology. It's a dollar that moves. It's more programmable, it moves better, right? But that's pretty relatable as opposed to a lot of the deeper kind of crypto stuff that that we may try. And so I think that makes it ripe for more consolidation and more acquisitive activity.

As Tradify and Web3 kind of overlap in that particular asset class. And so I just think what we've seen with Bridge, what we've seen with Privy is just like a harbinger of of, of probably more to come and I think we'll see exchange consolidation a bit as well. Coinbase did a big deal last month to get into, I think further into derivatives exchange, different asset class exchange as opposed to to spot markets and some of the institutional stuff they already serve.

And I think that you'll see some of that as well either to expand into a new market where an exchange might have a, a good regulatory kind of position already, or to expand the, the, the suite of kind of like market offerings that, that an exchange might have as well. And you have a bunch of kind of think mid-tier exchanges that are doing like decent volume, but struggling to grow as the big ones get bigger and probably are, you know, ripe for a growth acquisition there.

And so I, I, I, I think that, you know, you're seeing that the more traditional financialization of the acquisition market around some of these crypto companies and it's just kind of rocket fuel you know, to, to go around right now. So I think it's, it is it does feel like rising tide lifting, lifting all boats as at, at, at the moment, not just based on the price of, of Bitcoin, but based on sort of outside interest coming in.

Stephen: We saw Robinhood recently. We were at Consensus here in Toronto and Robinhood acquired Wonder, which spent probably the last three, four years acquiring every major, pretty much crypto exchange platform, and different licenses here in Canada. Before we jump into what you and the team are building at Eco, with all this hype around infrastructure, what's your lay of the lamb of what's going on today?

In regards to the stablecoin industry? Especially as more people are paying attention to the hype. A lot of new entrants in this space. To your point, you know, once you know one stablecoin company gets acquired or bought for millions if not billions of dollars. Every FinTech wants us flip on the stablecoin switch, the, the neon light, that they offer stablecoins in some way.

What do you, where are we right now in the ecosystem? If you had to put, you know, your finger on the pulse of the industry.

Ryne: Expansion mode, you know, universe expands, universe contracts, definitely expansion mode right now. And even, even sort of netting out the consolidation that we're seeing. I mean, this is the rush into the market, right? Like, I need staples and. You know, within that we're even inventing some new memes that I don't think we actually have a great definition for yet.

Like pay fi, right? Crypto's really good at like inventing a meme. Then everyone uses it as soon as it becomes interesting, and then you realize that it never meant anything. The more people that, or maybe it meant something, but it means less every next project that tries to, that tries to anchor to it.

And so that's probably the next, next example of that. But yeah, totally expan like, like expansion mode, traditional payment companies, money transfer companies trying to figure out how to leverage this technology. Trying to figure out whether they need to have some internal concept of a stablecoin, which platform they need to work with, or if they just need to accept existing stablecoins if yes, from where and which ones.

You have new chains rolling each month that seem promising. And then you have sort of stablecoin issuers new and old jockeying to support a lot of the best new protocols. And a lot of the, the sort of in demand. Chains. And so you have a pretty fragmented kind of state of affairs right now which I think kind of goes to what we're, what we're building at Eco and why, but it's just like total expansion mode, right?

It is just like a market rush in, and then there will be a lot of tying it all together. Business dealing, dust settling over the course of the rest of the year, probably into next year. And it's really exciting time. It might be in some ways the quote unquote most boring technology, but it turns out it's, it's the most useful one and it's the best way to get someone on chain and to keep a dollar on chain.

And then you can do more interesting things from there. But I think it's really good for the space writ large. And it, it, it feels kind of, like a total blitz right now. So..

Stephen: Everyone's been asking for the killer app when it came to crypto and Bitcoin, and really the killer app is stablecoins, right? Two thirds of every transaction in crypto is stablecoins. But to your point, it's not sexy, right? It's just, it's boring, it's simple. It looks very much like the digital dollar.

It doesn't have that appeal of a meme coin or an NFT. That's, you know, 300 times x. The day that it launches. But you have been building eco since 2018, so, you know, what was the ethos? What was your, what was the void, the gap that you were filling then, and how did you transition to where you are today?

Ryne: Okay. So we were right about some things and we were wrong about a bunch of things. The things we were right about though fortunately have carried us through. So we pivoted the product a couple times in a big way, but we haven't really pivoted the mission and that's helped us keep our best people.

It's helped us kind of build through the bear a couple times. And so what we, you know, what we started with. I think we were right about most of us were already crypto pilled, but most of us also had a payments background. So we had that like context and like, how does money move today? How does it not move today?

Where does compliance like factor into this? How does the card stack work? We had, we had kind of like that basis of understanding, and so we looked at stablecoins and we're just like, this is just like if, if nothing else, this is just sort of evolutionary payment technology. And it's a matter of when, not if but it's still very early.

I've said in other podcast and other conversations, and that day if I was pitching eco, I had to pitch stables first and then I could pitch eco, right? You had to get someone to, it was still like so soon. There wasn't like a proven stablecoin really that non crypto traders cared about or even trusted.

So it was like gen one for stablecoins, but I think we were right about just like the, it's just like fundamentally better money movement technology and the infra and the accessibility around it have to get a lot better. But that has held true and I think that has carried us through. And, you know, in the, in the seven years since we've basically just tried to make stablecoins more accessible to bring dollars on chain.

And we've come at it from a couple different angles, but that's like the, that's like the initial ethos in the earliest days. For, for your audience members who may remember, you know, Ethereum, you know, before the 2.0 upgrade, in the earliest days there was like a, a family tree of early algorithmic stablecoin and payment coin projects that were all too soon.

We were part of that we were all too soon because you could only build on Ethereum main net and it was usually just like too clunky and too slow. Even if your asset worked, some of the assets didn't work. It was total experimentation phase. And I'm actually quite nostalgic for that phase. There was a lot of legit experimentation.

There was some reckless experimentation, but that was, you know, you know, the, we were kind of, of that like, you could almost call it like pay fi in like at the time, right? Like, oh, you know, these are like, we need some notion of a non Bitcoin, Ethereum based flat or stable payment currency. Different projects have different ideas about how to achieve that and how to distribute it.

Most of us ended up, if, you know, if we lived through that era to going into infra because we realized that even if the asset worked, the underlying infra wasn't good enough to like distribute it and move it very well. And so a lot of those projects went into infra, went into defi. Once once 2020 and 2021 came around, but that's ultimately where we started.

That's our DNA. I think the belief in the association with stablecoins is kind of like kept our feet on the ground amidst crypto bears and crypto bulls. And we've, we've kind of lived to see today. That's what, that's what's carried us through. And happy to talk about the journey anywhere along the way.

Stephen: Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm curious because, you know, Eco's described as a stablecoin liquidity layer for like on chain apps and protocols, but I think many in the audience, including myself, is like, Hey, you know, stablecoins are highly liquid. Like it's pretty easy to get your hands on the stablecoin.

Why do these apps and protocols need a liquidity layer and like what are the issues that they're currently having without a suitable option like eco?

Ryne: Yeah, there's a couple there's a couple reasons. So, yeah, obviously, sort of, if you, if you know how to get into crypto, you can hop on Coinbase, you can get USDC like that. Right. If you have a centralized exchange account, you probably have access to a deeply liquid stable market. But that's kinda like if you know your way in. And, but then you have this multi chain crypto landscape where the things you might want to do are increasingly somewhere else, right? And it's still not quite as easy as it needs to be to get somewhere else. The technology to get there, to take you there is better and better and better. At least it exists now, but it's maybe not auto as automated or as intelligent as it needs to be.

Okay. Why is all this relevant? In crypto we call that the interop problem. The interop problem is that there are different blockchains that host different things that you might wanna do. And hopping between those blockchains in a way that's intuitive and seamless is still you know, not easy. But in stablecoins, we have an interoperable asset class across chains for the first time ever. Okay, so native assets not interoperable. If I have eth over here and I need soul over there, I can't, I can't do that really. And, but if I have a stablecoin, I can go in between and I can sort of, translate my user journey into something that I understand pretty well, which is a dollarized value to get from point A to point B.

And that's a very, very it's, it, it, you know, it, it's hiding in plain sight as a user experience inside. It's a very powerful one. So now, if I have a stable on chain, that should be sufficient in our opinion, eco's opinion, to do whatever else it is you need to do on chain. We should be able to connect you in that user journey.

And even if you need some other asset out the other side, we should be able to price that in the stable you're holding and and get you there ideally in one click. Remember, our DNA is consumer apps and payments. We understand the value of fewer clicks. We're great at click golfing. That's, you know, that, that, that optimization really drives us.

Okay. The reason why stablecoin liquidity is then so important is in this multi chain environment, stablecoin liquidity is user experience. It needs to be in the right place for you to get from point A to point B. And if it's not, you're gonna end up with an expensive transaction, a high slippage transaction, or just not even being able to make the transaction.

And that is the market structure. That's not very good. So that is a different market structure from the one you're talking about in your question, which is like, I could get on an exchange pretty easily or in a FinTech app and get my stablecoin, but what then if you wanna do something else with a stable or maybe with a different asset that's on some other place, that's the market problem that we, that we're going after.

And it turns out that market for stablecoin liquidity is a mess. Because new chains and new stables are rolling all the time. That further fragments that, that, that market, that liquidity sort of space. And you have all of these, you know, defi protocols basically competing for stablecoin liquidity. And so you end up with a lot of stablecoin and liquidity redundancy on different chains.

Count the number of U-S-D-C-U-S-D-T pairs across Ethereum. It's kind of, it's, it's actually kind of nuts. And so what our network does is it tries to allocate stablecoin liquidity where order flow wants it to be, where consumers want it to be, to match them with the thing that they want to do, you know, when it needs to be there.

And we try to do that in a more and more intelligent way as we scale up the network. And if there's always liquidity to translate your on chain action into a simple, stable send and to carry that transaction through, then that at the end of the day is fundamentally better user experience. That means we can enable a user to just need to hold a stable if that's all they care about.

That means that we can enable a developer to just support a stable or a basket of stables with one simple balance. And then they don't have to worry about the rest of the corner of the UX complexity of, of what el, what else happens on chain. They can just have that familiar pattern in their app and make their use case better and optimize it from there.

And we can denominate the journey with sort of the liquidity need that, that we need, where it's needed, when it's needed to bring the user out the other side to do the thing they wanna do. And so it's a little bit more of a, that sort of inefficient liquidity market is one that most people don't operate in.

They don't really see it, but you feel it whenever you incur onerous terms. You can't actually get from point A to point B. And we don't want the average end user or sort of application developer to have to feel it anymore. So we wanna connect the chains and the stable assets that are most in demand and ensure that liquidity is dynamically allocated among them in a way that reflects order flow and on chain activity at any given moment so that users can get from point A to point B simply by holding a stable, if that's all they want to do.

That's where we sit set.

Stephen: And what is the existing situation? Is it the use of bridges? Like what are people doing in the interim when it comes to combating interoperability? Does it only work if you're part of like circles payment network where it's still fragmented? If you're not part of the network? What is the existing situation for the, you know, the people that you're solving The biggest problem for?

Ryne: Well, I think right now, one inconvenience is that the situation depends on what stable you hold and where now that's one that, that's one thing that we want to, to sort of, improve. So if it so happens that you're holding a particular asset in particular chain and that that asset is not accepted out the other side or transferrable into native gas out the other side, you're kind of stuck.

You gotta go find your own kind of user journey or bridging journey to, to, to get the right asset out the other side, to do the thing you wanna do. And so you end up kind of somewhat ironically with all these, all these like non interoperable dollars. Ironically, it's actually like worse than the banking system is right now in a way, you know, visa and Swift, et cetera are like, are like better dollar interoperability solutions than we currently have in Web3.

And, you know, that's, I think that's, that's our, our particular opportunity. And so and so, yeah, it demands like really, really capital efficient and rapid and tightly priced stablecoin bridging. It demands a really good pro programmability solution out the other side. If you're not just trying to bridge a stablecoin, but you're trying to do a thing to make sure that you chain those actions together and it demands a really good liquidity base among the sort of chains that are most in demand and the stables that are most in demand.

So you have kind of coverage among them. And it's interesting, I think like eco is sort of categorically distinct as we think about it and, you know, should be somewhat neutral. Vis-a-vis chains and stablecoin issuers. If you show me a sort of an order flow vector that has some demand, and then we'll try to figure out a way to connect the right bridge route with the right, with the right assets, with the right transaction data to do something else and serve that.

All I need to see is order, flow and demand for a particular chain of particular stable. And, and, and we will figure out how to, how to meet it within the resources that we have. And so really we're just trying to enable people, you know, how would I put it? This is kind of a crypto phrase, but we're trying to enable people to not only be chain abstracted, but to be stable, abstracted so that at the end of the day, if your developer or user again, and you have that stable, you just got a dollar and you shouldn't exactly have to care.

So you know what dollar it is and what assets, so long as they're high integrity assets underneath and where it sits at any, any given moment, so long as it remains liquid for you to do the next thing you want to do in the next, you know, in, in the next transaction, wherever that may take you. And then just sort of abstract away the liquidity, fragmentation and aggregation and flow so you don't have to worry about it.

Does that make sense?

Stephen: It does. I'm actually curious when it comes to the different chains, like what are the use cases right now? Is it like a, a enterprise client looking to settle, buy stablecoin halfway around the world? Is it, you know, the retail investor that's looking to, you know, switch chains and get, you know, liquidity on other chains?

Like, can you gimme the main use cases for eco.

Ryne: Yeah. Just bridging a stable is usually a means to an end today. Usually you're trying to do a thing. Okay. So, you know, of course you have your kind of like scattershot base of retail users that are sending five to several thousand dollars at a time because they want to go do a thing. That usually means they're trying to farm something or they're trying to get into a defi protocol.

Or they might just be topping up gas at a lesser amount. And we have a user interface called portal. That serves those people, you know, scattershot, you know, there's really good user retention there. We usually see wallet addresses come back, but you know, it, it may be more or less amounts, more or less frequently, but that's just I'll, I just need that stable over there to participate in that thing.

So I'm gonna send a hundred bucks. That's sort of, you know, one category, but I can get much more specific in the other categories. So we have really fast and cheap ways to move stables. They're highly performant at some size, you know, it's pretty fast and pretty cheap to move a stable at 10 bucks or 20 bucks.

Oftentimes it, it, there may not be sufficient liquidity and you may have quite a bit of slippage once you get it. 10,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand, a million. And we tend to be pretty performant in those, in, in, in those ranges. Which obviously takes you kind of outside of the, the retail scattershot bridging use case and into more of a institutional clientele.

Kinda wholesale stablecoin flow set of use cases. Okay. What are those? Liquid funds that for whatever reason are rebalancing liquidity to serve intent marketplaces uh, would be one really good example. So market makers that are just managing cross chain liquidity, they need to move it fast, they need to move it cheap.

would be one good, one Good example. You have your professional traders and defi farmers that are looping through some sophisticated strategy pretty quickly, trying to recycle stablecoin liquidity maybe between a couple chains that are incentivized for whatever particular reason. Which is kind of an interesting one, right?

Because like if they're just like looping liquidity, then from that protocols perspective, you would not call that a retained user, right? You would call that a farmer, but from my perspective, it's a retained user. 'cause they're using my infra to do their thing because my infra is just the most performant for them to move their money.

And so from our perspective, you know, long live the smart farmer basically who's, who's recycling capital if they're doing it using our infra. And then increasingly we see B2B, maybe like pay fi, if that's what we want to call it. Use cases, become interested. you know, you have some of these companies that, that are trying to support different stables from different chains because that's what their customers are asking for.

And then they end up with kind of like this messy internal treasury problem of trying to manage those stables across those different chains. And sometimes to meet rebalancing requests or bridging requests for their customers at size. And to the extent those are non-custodial stables we can help those clients, you know, basically rebalance internally and do better treasury management on on better terms most often.

And so that third one is a definite category, but it's like a little bit of a immature one right now. It's that third one is usually filled out by products that have just met user requests. You know, one big customer in their platform wants to hold USDC on base. Another one wants to hold pi USD on Solana.

They say yes to those requests, but then they end up with this sort of like messy internal problem of managing stablecoin liquidity across those ecosystems and across those assets and looking for more capital efficient ways to make them interoperable. And so we see more and more of that kind of problem statement coming in the door.

You know, which we're trying to optimize to, to, to help with those would be sort of the areas that we see the most activity today. I think that an emergent one very soon for us will be the fastest, cheapest, one click way to deposit into a new chain launch. All new chains want stables. They want to incentivize stable TV L to come in.

And if we can sort of enable a user holding a basket of other stables elsewhere to batch those and send it into that new chain 'cause they wanna do a thing there or participate in that, that chain's incentives in one action, that's a very high conversion, very valuable sort of proposition for new chain ecosystems that are trying to attract stablecoin liquidity or new issuers that are trying to go there as well.

And that's an emergent category that I think will be very, very active for us in the second half of the year.

Stephen: And to your point, it's not very easy to do that. Now you have to go through several different means to get to that, that easy UX place. I'm actually curious, your docs mentions crowd liquidity system where, you know, enable stake stablecoin holders to passively contribute to the eco network and receive yield.

Is this like classified as protocol based yield, like via native staking, or is this more of like a lending product?

Ryne: I it's kind of. It's more like the former, but it has an element of the latter is it is almost, it's almost a new primitive maybe not quite. You could quibble with that. And I think a lot of smart defi people would quibble with that. But it is something we're trying to, to, to sort of, make distinct.

And so now we're in, now we're in. Um, It's been a fun conversation. Now we're now we're probably like in a little bit Alpha league, alpha league territory. So, what is really interesting about crowd liquidity is we have this perspective about the market that as more stablecoins come on chain, there are going to be, there's going to be more idle stablecoin capacity sitting there under leveraged.

I just believe that's true because as dollars become fragmented, they become higher overhead for people to keep track of and to put to work. That's why we all tend to have stagnant dollars spread between Venmo, PayPal, bank account, brokerage. At any given time, we're usually not very good at putting that to work.

Even in this programmable money environment, I believe is more stable has come on chain. They're fragmented today, there's gonna be more idle liquidity to tap. We also believe that that's ultimately gonna be the most scalable source of liquidity to serve a lot of cross chain order flow today. And so what we wanna do is, if you are in the eco network, if you're holding stablecoins on any support in any supported chat asset, on any supported chain, right?

Whether in a wallet or a protocol front end, whatever it may be, we want to incentivize you to permit whatever idle or excess capacity or liquidity you have to be allocated behind the scenes by the network where it's most profitable to serve order flow that the network is otherwise experiencing and serving.

And the way to maybe think the best analogy for, for crowd liquidities, it's like a, like a meta order book for stablecoin order flow. It's a pretty powerful concept. It's like a cross chain order book for stablecoin order flow to allocate stablecoin liquidity when and where it's it's most, it's most needed.

And it's because a lot of these bridges, the way a lot of these bridges work in trying to move stables around is they sort of like call to market makers in the background and the market makers fulfill the order. And that ends up being a, a very capital efficient and very fast experience from moving that money.

And so you have kind of like this disorganized kind of market of capital allocators that are watching that order flow. Says Ryne wants to move a hundred, a hundred USDC from chain A to chain B, he doesn't have a bridging route available to him. Is there a market maker that sees that in an order flow auction and says, I'll give Ryne a hundred on chain B minus a, a basis point or two basis points for the convenience.

And we both go on our way. And right now they have to bring their own liquidity. There are a couple other protocols that are trying to sort of like raise LP funds to allow them to tap that liquidity instead. Which scales up to a certain point, but we think what scales far beyond that is to tap retail and institutional sort of passive capital alike to leverage when they don't need it.

And you almost end up with sort of like this meta order book concept for flowing any stables in any direction across our network with that yield exposed really for the first time to these individual participants who can just sort of permit that, that liquidity to be utilized and passively earn as part of that meta pool.

And it's interesting. Hyper liquid did something like this is like a, like a narrower example. In the early days, I don't know, a year, year and a half ago, they were seeing really good growth and they opened up this, this HLP concept, this hyper liquid sort of LP vault. And all it requested people to do is deposit USDC and that's it.

Single-sided liquidity, the simplest asset, just put USDC in and this vault is going to run. A bunch of market making strategies in the platform. So you're basically providing depth and liquidity to the platform and the vol run the market making and it'll share the yield with you. And you know, if you're early to hyper liquid, that was a pretty good yield source.

This is like pretty analogous. We want you to, to sort of supply your stables when you don't need them. You can do it sort of passively and the network is gonna utilize them to sort of build depth where there needs to be depth in this cross chain environment. Organize kind of order flow and share yield with those that are participating in the concept.

And that's why we call it crowd liquidity. It's kinda like liquidity for the people by the people transparently on chain. And it provides an incentive to not only put your stable or put your dollar on chain into a stable, but keep your stable there. Which is obviously the end game for all of us.

Move the money on chain. And so we're pretty excited about

Stephen: time like they can, they can't untake for a certain amount of time. I think salon's about 48 hours that you can't unstick. I could be wrong about that. 24 to 48 hours or you can't remove the

Ryne: No. So that's where the staking analogy breaks down. It's, it needs to stay, in our opinion next block liquid. So to really be a passive participant, you basically need to be able to say, yeah, eco. You know, like any given block, use my, use my sort of permitted liquidity to fulfill an order flow to rebalance, but the next block I need it.

I need confidence that it's available to me. Okay? And that's what's pretty powerful here. You can be truly passive without managing some complex sort of unlocking your LP strategy by just allowing the network to sweep liquidity in the background at any given moment. Now, because of how eco works, you can be, remember what I said earlier, we want to make it such that the user experience for traversing this, this network is truly chain abstracted and stable abstracted.

If that is true, you don't really care at any given moment, maybe where that stable is or what basket of four stables it may be. So long as you trust that your dollar is your dollar at the next moment you need it. And that's what's very powerful about crowd liquidity. It allows true passive participation while keeping you liquid the next block.

It's just that on any given block you don't need your funds. It, they can be utilized to fulfill some intent order or to fund, fund some sort of solver execution. And then you'll get paid back and it'll sort of, that'll be yield that you earn in that moment. But you'll otherwise be able to utilize your dollar spending power in the next block.

You need to, and I think that's a really, really interesting component of this. Now you can imagine if you wanna turn this into a protocol that you might incentivize some base level of liquidity to voluntarily stake or lockup and maybe they sort of like have a little bit of surplus yield if they do so.

Just so you un just so you know, you have some baseline over a given time window that you can rely upon in that capacity is, is, is sort of your minimum viable capacity. You can imagine some incentive structure that would, that would sort of ask LPs to LP in that way, but. On top of that, I think passive retail could permit $10 or $10 million depending on sort of who the person is, who the institution is, what they wanna do, and if they trust that it's going to remain liquid to them, the next sort of, you know, the next time they wanna transact, then it's a pretty powerful concept.

And that's why we think that, you know, we think that's also a design requirement to make, to make this pool of capital kind of scale to the depth of demand for flowing, flowing stables cross chain today.

Stephen: When you talk about, you know, one click user experience, you know, my compliance hat goes off a little. Like what regulatory obligations do you have for like, or your network partners when it comes to things like consumer protection? 'cause that one click, if they, if they make the wrong move, is always scary.

Like sanctions monitoring. Would you have to put in place from like a regulatory or legal standpoint?

Ryne: Yeah, I, I think we're, we're in a, like a, a somewhat neutral position there, which is kind of nice. We programmatically move money. We don't own the consumer. Okay. And so what that means is you can imagine probably, you know, as, as we scale up as crypto scales up, there'll need to be some sort of probable

a ML sanctions monitoring type of type of tool, kind of, watching these types of networks. But otherwise we're not in the flow of funds. So that kind of like takes us out of money transmission regime, and we're kind of like B two, B2C. And so the analogy I use very often is Visa. Right. Like, what's interesting is, you know, there's a few things that work about that analogy, but the piece of that analogy I'll focus on for this, for this answer is that we, we oftentimes, it's one of the most recognizable consumer brands in the world, but a lot of times people don't realize you're not actually a customer of Visa.

You're a customer of your bank who is licensed with Visa to issue you a card. And it's a similar way of thinking about kind of like where our network sits, right? The app brings the account, the wallet brings the account, they sort of bring the end user, they onboard the end user. The end user holds stables in that app front end or in that wallet.

And that product calls to our network if they need stablecoin liquidity or they need stablecoin routing basically. And they can consume sort of R APIs or SDKs to kind of stable point, abstract their front end if they want to. But in that case, if you're dealing with sort of wallet regimes, if you're dealing for what you know, for whatever reason with mtls, if you're dealing with KYC, typically those obligations are going to, to need to be handled obviously by the, by the product that owns the consumer.

And then from our perspective, there's probably, you know, as the regulatory kind of environment matures around a lot of these networks, probably some sanctions monitoring technology that'll be integrated down the road. You might, you might imagine. Right now, it's not really an overt requirement right now.

I'm not, you know, that that technology exists, but it's still pretty immature. But I would think that if, if, if anything is relevant to kind of exact how we programmatically move funds, it might be kind of that regulatory regime. But we're gonna generally probably need to rely upon those that own the consumer for the more table stakes, KYC type stuff.

Stephen: You talked a little bit about the crowd liquidity system and the launch. You know, the main net launch for the eco network is coming up soon, I believe. But you already have products in the wild eco roots eco accounts, maybe break down. What are eco roots? What are eco accounts? So like what problem are you solving with those applications?

Ryne: Super, super simple routes. Fastest stablecoin money movement. That's, that's it. That's pure stablecoin bridging. These are intent-based routes. What intent-based routes mean is, is kind of that order flow construct that I explained to before. What do you wanna send your stable from point A to point B?

You what, what actually happens is your con, your transaction is constructed by your app. You sort of tap your button and it sends that as a structured kind of order for liquidity that a market maker called a solver will receive and will, will fulfill for you. And usually that tends to be the, the most seamless and fastest user experience for moving money cross chain today.

And we care a lot about user experience, especially for stables. And so that's why we built using that paradigm. Now they're highly optimized for stables only and so there's some, you know, some technical simplification in that. There's some pricing simplification in that. And that's why, honestly why we built them.

We felt that if we, you know, there were other intent bridges in, in the marketplace that are very good, but we felt like if we built our own and, and optimized, you know. Most of it for stables or like pair any sort of like, like price assets. We could squeeze quite a bit more performance and capital efficiency out of it, which based on our benchmarks today seems to be true.

And so super simple. I just need to move stables across chain. That's what eco routes do really well. We have a front end for that called portal. If you're an individual user with a wallet and you wanna try it, you can go to portal eco.com. Otherwise it's consumed via an SDK by integrating third parties that just want really, really capital efficient stablecoin movement.

So that's routes. That was our first product. We launched it in beta. Going into this year I would say it's late beta now. It's kind of full prod. The only thing that's really beta about it is that we've rate limited kind of order flow, sending limits to sort of gradually increase, you know, measure performance, optimize performance, increase liquidity in the network.

So, you know, that's that's probably our most, most mature product right now and has really taken off over the last six weeks. 20 x in volume over the last six weeks. Nothing changed except for us increasing limits. So that shows us the demand has been there and we just need to keep increasing limits, increasing network capacity to meet it.

Accounts as much earlier I would call accounts and Alpha Pro product today it's, it, it's kind of a, a narrowly tailored product. We're not trying to introduce some new consumer wallet or some new consumer front end. We're trying to expose APIs to existing front ends that allow them to, to program a, a stablecoin transaction to, to do something else.

And that's where the one click stables send UX really comes in. And so they, they, they tightly couple with our routes. And so if you've integrated the accounts SDK, and you're trying to do something, you know, richer than just. Enable a user to bridge a stable. Then accounts are sort of a, a programmatical construct bundles data for our routes network to know what to do out the other side so that hopefully you can, you know, as a developer translate various cross chain actions into that simple, consistent one Click stable send, the same way that Visa translates a bunch of money movement around the world for me into a swipe or a tap.

And otherwise I don't have to worry about it. And that's why accounts exist. They exist to basically enable the developer to kind of stablecoin abstract to their end users, build for a stablecoin UX alone, and trust that that stablecoin kind of, experience can still do arbitrary things cross chain that may go beyond just holding a stable.

So that's what accounts as today, it's kind of an alpha slash prototype state with a couple early partners. We're kind of designing it and optimizing it according to their requirements. And uh, I would say that accounts probably goes beta. Definitely goes beta in Q3. And I think what's interesting, kinda like another alpha drop is some notion of accounts will lead into a crowd liquidity campaign for us.

So we want people sort of permitting or setting up eco accounts through whatever integrated product they're doing. Because that, that's what gives you kind of like the future proof, one click experience to do other things in the network as the network expands. And so I think that we'll probably make a push around accounts with some partners in Q3 before we open up a crowd liquidity campaign.

And it'll be those people who have set up accounts that probably get first access um, because they can one click into it. And so those are the two products today to kind of like lead into crowd liquidity. And you can think of like routes and accounts network, the dollars, They connect to the protocols, the front ends and the chain ecosystems where stablecoins are most in demand and have sort of, and settle most often have the most flow.

And then crowd liquidity is what asks to take those network dollars and to activate them in a new way that makes the network far more powerful and far more capital efficient overall.

Stephen: You talked about partnerships. You had the big partnership with Super Bridge and Caldera. What made them good partners and what are some of the main use cases for their integration?

Ryne: So Super Bridge is an early aggregator one for us. And that one a huge fan of Super Bridge for a couple reasons. They're super lean, by the way. So like, if you want a really good example of like a, like a hyper lean, just handful of people just building with customers. Super Bridge is a great example of this.

And so in our early, in our earlier days with routes it was our first kind of like a like aggregator interface. And the reason that's really important if you're an intent protocol which eco kind of needs but is more than is you wanna benchmark your order flow against others. You wanna know where you're, where you're not performing enough.

You want to know where you win and you need to decide then where you want to keep winning versus where you wanna try to com, you know, compete and get better. Very rarely will an intent protocol win every order for every asset from $1 to a hundred thousand dollars. There's a lot of transaction profiles in between and you need to understand kind of like where you're best.

And so the aggregator integrations are really, are really good ones because they, they, they sort of put you into a competitive order flow environment where you only get order, you know, you only, you only get the order through the front end if you're most performant on the backend. And so Super Bridge for us was really, really good in that way.

They also kind of have this, these tailored bridge interfaces that are like chain specific and really good UI and pretty good UX flow and very well branded. And we've been able to, to, to partner with them on a, on a sort of like a, a couple brand specific bridges as well. And so that was our first integrator.

You, or I mean, aggregator, you obviously want more. Over time. But super Bridge has a special place for us just because of how lean they are, how directly they work with their customers, and because it was our first exposure at all to competitive order flow. And what was the second one you asked about?

Was it Caldera?

Stephen: Yeah.

Ryne: Yeah. Okay. So this obviously very different profile. Caldera is an infrastructure provider in the space, highly competitive, kind of roll up as a service space. All these new chains launching, it's hard to run your own infra to launch a chain. And there's, you know, four or five big roll-up as a service provider, companies that, that compete to serve new chains.

And caldera is, is one of the main ones and a close partner of ours. What is interesting about Caldera is that they're also sort of like trying to move their ecosystem more on chain and, and, and like actually turned it into its own sort of, what would I say on Chain Native, the, they call it metal layer on chain, sort of native infra uh, where these roll-ups are not only utilizing their sort of off chain infrastructure for uptime, et cetera, but they're sharing data and sharing state within the Caldera network on chain through this concept they call metal layer.

That's pretty distinct in, you know, in, in the rollup landscape. And what we do with, with some of these rollup service providers. And what we've done first with Caldera was get eco routes natively integrated, okay? So that if you stand up a chain in their ecosystem, you automatically have permissionless liquidity through eco high conversion, stablecoin, liquidity through eco.

So long as you have any demand for order flow, if you do, liquidity will be allocated in your direction and people will be able to find their way to your chain with a stable and settle according to your preference. And, that's a pretty powerful integration for us because it means that every new chain they roll will utilize eco for stablecoin order flow.

So long as, you know, we remain as performant as we have. It also means though, since Caldera has sort of is more on chain native than some of the other rollup providers, that it's kind of a full stack partnership. So it starts with routes. We will sort of expose accounts and early access to accounts to those chains that wanna opt into it or the developers that, that wanna opt into it.

But what it also means critically down the road is that Caldera as an ecosystem can effectively kind of be a crowd liquidity parti participant. They can sort of self-fund crowd liquidity and they can benefit from that yield coming into the Caldera ecosystem from wherever else across the network.

And so it's a really, really powerful partnership, not only because the Native routes integration, but because it'll probably be. The first major proof of concept for crowd liquidity in its earliest estate before crowd liquidity becomes more open. And that's something we really look forward to, and it's a partner that we, we try to support as directly and as best we can that we're literally working with every single day to ensure that we make their ecosystem better, however we can you know, when it comes down to flowing stables.

And so I think you can look for a lot more from that partnership. And, and, and, you know, another big announcement from that partnership as, as early as the next couple weeks.

Stephen: Now is gonna be my next question is like what big announcements are coming out, but I'm actually curious as we start ending off this conversation. You went from CEO to CEO, back to CEO for, you know, part two. What was the shift between the two roles for you and in such a competitive market? Like what are some of the tips that you give for those that are hiring top talent?

Ryne: oh man uh, yeah. This almost never works. This is a way that. There's a few ways that, that I think eco is, is unique. This is one of 'em, this would almost never work. But for us, the CEO shifts in the past have lined up with our pivot points. So I was sort of the initial CEO of the company in the first couple years we were on chain.

We were building this sort of, you know, early payment tech payment currency concept. You know, I spoke to that era earlier circa, you know, 2018 to 2020. And then at the end of 2020 we realized, okay, this is not as usable as we want it to be. Ethereum is not scaling as quickly as we thought it would.

And then critically we thought when we started, the wallets are gonna bring the end users. And so we spent a couple years building infra, and then we got out the other side and the infra was kind of clunky and the wallets weren't bringing the users. And so going to 2020, we made a very impactful decision.

We said, all right, it's too soon. On the infra side USDC is now a thing. We think that makes the concept of a stablecoin far easier to understand, way easier to opt into. And so we decided to just pivot the company to build A-U-S-D-C based bank replacement app called the Eco App. If your listeners have heard of ECO before, they would probably heard of Eco because this product did pretty well for a couple years.

And so that's where I slide into the c the the COO role. We brought my co-founder Andy in full-time as CEO. I think he was sort of better positioned to kind of like take that and run with it. With that product pivot, I think we needed new energy and we, we wanted to sort of fundraise on the basis of the early traction we were seeing do another round.

And so I slotted in the COO role in fall 2020, and Andy came in full-time as CEO and uh, that, you know, that was the. The kind of like beta window for the app. We sort of built it out aggressively. We raised a couple rounds on the basis of some really great early traction we were seeing and we're off to the races.

Ultimately that became an extremely difficult product to build and scale in the us. So in spite of our early success, which was pretty pretty powerful, it, it sort of the regulatory environment became more hostile. It didn't, it, it didn't catch up. It literally went the opposite direction. It became more hostile and a lot of the funds flows in partnerships that we had secured to support the app became really, really difficult to maintain.

And, uh, we wound that product. We ended up winding that product down, you know, which is part of our kind of unique history is we've built at the, at the infra layer and at the app layer, and we can kind of, sort of pull insights from both. But after, after winding that product down, we knew we had, a pretty good backend on chain tech for that product that we might be able to sort of build out, repackage and offer to other developers.

And that became what we're building now. So essentially that was a second big pivot in the company's history and we kind of like went back on chain. We had tried to operate this hybrid product money transmission regulated environment for a long time that has a lot of overhead. Once we wound that down we didn't wanna deal with that overhead anymore, so we said we're gonna go back to pure on chain development.

so, you know, four years later I came back as a, I I hadn't gone anywhere. I was a c still the COO, so there was still continuity there, but I was driving a lot of the, the conviction behind this kind of like new on chain roadmap. Obviously the, the app wind down season had been pretty difficult and we thought that it was a better fit if I, if I took the torch up a new and, and ran with it.

And so, you know, I think when you look at it, if you understand eco's history. The CEO Changeups actually lined up, you know, right during those windows of product pivots. And, and for us, they were just like logical founder, CEO product fit decisions. And and, and fortunately is, at least in our case, not the result of some sort of founder drama.

And that's really, that, that's why it's worked, to be honest, I think. I think you don't get away with that twice

Stephen: Jobs moment.

Ryne: now. You don't, you don't, you don't get away with that. You don't get away with that twice. You don't get away with that twice, I don't think. If it's, if, if there's like real drama that's causing it in the background, you only get away with it if there's like really good fundamental kind of, you know, person fit reasons for what you're trying to do with your roadmap, what you're trying to do, sort of with your stakeholders and how you're trying to, to direct your company.

And so, that's a really unique element of our history. Um, And. You know, it's, it's one of, you know, I hope, I hope that they tell us, you know, I hope they tell a story about after some sort of successful outcome. And yeah, I, I think through that also, it's, it's, it's pretty interesting. Andy and I, Andy and I, were, we're, we're co-founders obviously, but we've, you grow close in a particular way when you have to execute that twice, right?

And so, Andy remains probably my, my closest confidant, definitely one of my, my closest two or three and highly involved. It's just very unique shared history that we have that I may, might be hard for I for some to relate to. And then the second part of your question was about just the talent market.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.

Ryne: that, is that where you're.

Stephen: you know, you have to hire developers. It's a competitive market no matter where you are, especially now with AI people, you know, developers are moving into that space versus blockchain. How do you, you know, hire and maintain toptal?

Ryne: Uh, I think we've done a great job of both, to be honest. Eco team is pretty lit and our, our retention over the years has been pretty fantastic. One thing I'm, I'm very proud of is that our first two employees are still here through all thick and thin. They've been here since since early mid 2018, which is, I think, pretty telling for us and something I'm very proud of.

You know, I, I don't know. I, I think

I'm gonna take this, I'll take this answer and I'll, I'll bring this back around a minute, but like, there's all this startup advice, there's all this founder advice, and you just like, you know, it's, it's, it's your, it's your conviction that that carries you, you through and it's, it's your willingness to be yourself, that carries you through and you know, there's all this advice and sometimes you, you, you, you just start trying to play the game in ways that, aren't, aren't, you know, you may not, may not be ways that that, that you're best at. And I just find that as you become more seasoned, you get pretty good at understanding what weaknesses you need to fix, what weaknesses you can kind of like delegate to others who are better than you and what strengths you need to maximize. And it's your conviction that carries you through you through the hard moments. Now, why is that relevant to this answer? There's a lot of different ways to hire. But if you do a really good job of writing down why you need to make a hire and what outcomes you need from that hire and if you do a really good job of understanding not only individually what that hire needs to accomplish, but also how they fit within a lean team as a puzzle piece, then you can raise the bar with every next one.

It's almost like every next hire has a little bit, a little bit higher bar to raise than the one before. And you know, eventually that starts to, that starts to become unsustainable past a certain point. But you can sustain that for a while. And I think that where we've been very, very successful at hiring is understanding what we want out of a particular hire and being able to match intangibles to that puzzle piece, part of the equation.

And identify those things pretty early, both in the job description phase as well as kind of in how we screen people. And we have a team that's been through a lot that has extremely high trust, has a lot of learned wisdom, has scar tissue, and has a lot of cohesion as a result. And so, I think being able to kind of like earn that level of trust through the interview process is pretty important to us.

And at this point in time, we're just comfortable being ourselves. And if you're comfortable being yourself with confidence and what you're doing and with some data that shows that it's working. Great talent tends to self-select, and that's the best thing that can happen. And so that's just, that's why I think that we've, we've done well there and, and we've generally retained retained people well.

Along the way.

Stephen: I love it, and you know, where can people find you? This has been such a fascinating conversation. I think there's a lot more people looking at stablecoins, whether it's a career investment or just knowledge. They see this space blowing up. Where's the best place to follow you and all your content?

Ryne: We're easy to find. Okay. Uh, We've got a very simple brand. A very great brand. If you're interested in Eco, you wanna learn more about it, you can find us at eco.com. It's that simple eco.com. If you wanna find us on Twitter and follow along in real time, we're just at eco, that's easy too. And then if you're interested in sort of what I have to say intermittently it's just my first and last name on Twitter @rynesaxe.

And that's, that should be easy enough as well. So, we're not hard to find, and I think we have a, a pretty, pretty big summer ahead, so I hope some people tune in.

Stephen: I appreciate this conversation. One last thing I'm dying to ask you. We've mentioned meta a couple times, Facebook in a conversation. Basically what they're doing like with the stablecoin industry right now is what they were trying to do with Libra. Why do you think that failed? Were regulators just not ready at that time to concede that there was an alternative to the traditional financial ecosystem?

Was it like just way too many users, you know, not prioritizing privacy? Why do you think that project failed when seemingly the same, you know, the same underlying assets that they were going to be using? You mentioned bucket earlier in the conversation, is what people are now doing with stablecoins all around the world.

Ryne: I'm pretty opinionated about this and I think it's actually pretty simple. I was not in the room and I, I think it was actually a pretty good design. So I don't wanna, you know, I, I don't wanna come across as ignorant and, and, and, and critical. I just think that they came out like I, I, they came out saying new money, and I think it was a fundamental error. I, I just think it was a fundamental misjudgment. I think the, the model was pretty good, but I think they should have probably started more grassroots and I think neither consumers nor regulators were ready for new money and they, they came out with that in a period of time when they were already under a, a fair amount of regulatory scrutiny for other reasons.

And I think it just. It landed with a thud and you know, I don't know. I dunno how they calibrated that and, and how they decided on its positioning. I think that the economic design of the model was actually pretty good. I think the sort of ecosystem foundation collective model was actually pretty good.

They got a lot of stakeholder kind of buy-in for it. Obviously the distribution would've been, would've been guaranteed. And so they had so many of like the, the smart pieces. I think they just sort of out with the wrong message and put an undue level of scrutiny upon themselves upfront and honestly kind of kinda shot themselves in the foot, in my opinion.

And I, you know, I, I, I'm opinionated about this because I spent the first couple years of the company trying to tell people about new money and um, they didn't want it yet. I wanted, I wanted them to want it, but they didn't want it yet. I'm, I'm still pretty sure they don't want it yet. And I think that crypto will lead us there, but, you know, we're here talking about stablecoins, which is a new dollar, but not new money.

So I don't think they want it yet. And, you know, we had a pretty good network, so I would talk to people who were pretty, fairly well connected and when I would tell them about it in the early days, even if they would get it, they would also tell me regulators don't want that yet either. You know, Raul Powell, when I, I I was sort of an early confidant that I, that I wanted to talk to about this and, you know, on an ethos basis, he, he, he liked it a lot, but his very candid feedback is they'll never let you build it if you get big enough. I think he was right because Stablecoin tried to build it in their own way and they were already more than big enough. And it really, it really, I think they stubbed their toe. So I think it's honestly as simple as that. I think it's positioning, I think it's sort of like starting too loud and I think it's, it, it, a more grassroots product strategy would've, would've probably done them better and built some early network effects and allowed them to then show regulators value delivered and value held in the network such that it would've been more difficult for regulators to take something that consumers were showing they wanted away. And there's just like an order of operations there that in the network effect of it all that I think that they may miscalibrated

Stephen: And to your point, they try to make it sexy because you know, if you put like, you know, dollar to dollar peg to an asset, it doesn't sound as sexy as new money. And I think that's, to your point, that's the marketing mishap they probably did. And you never want to use, it's the reason why I think the word disruption and disrupt has been removed from decks over the last five years.

You know, when I started in 2018, that's all I heard. The fintechs were gonna disrupt banks until they realized they needed bank accounts to operate their business. And we kind of saw that, kind of saw that, you know, go by the wayside. It, it wasn't advantage to say you're a disruptor. I remember there was even like business shows called the Disruptor and I think those ones have have gone in its place.

Ryne, this has been an amazing conversation. I love your genuine insights and candid thoughts, and we can't wait to see when the launch happens, and maybe we can get you on at the end of the year and see exactly how it all played out.

Ryne: I am here for it. We're gonna crescendo between now and then we'll have a lot more to talk about. It's been a really fun conversation. I appreciate the unique questions and, and, and the curiosity. So I'll come back on anytime. This has been really

Stephen: I love it. Thank you so much.

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