Phantom launches Cash stablecoin on Bridge's Open Issuance to bring crypto into daily spending

You heard from Zach about the partnership. We're diving deeper. New stable coin alert. Stable coins. How you doing? What's happening Brandon? Great to have you back. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Big day. Big day. What's the news? Yeah. Well, um yeah, again, thanks for having me. Um yeah, big news today.

Today we launched uh two new products. So, one is cash the stable coin built on top of open issuance in partnership with Bridge and Stripe.

And then the second thing we launched is a product experience called Phantom Cash that's actually built inside the Phantom app that utilizes the cash stable coin to basically create a bunch of daily money applications uh that people uh you know will enrich people's daily consumer financial lives.

Do you think this is more about giving folks who are already cryptonative using Phantom wallet uh access to cash products that they can bring into the real world or like the web 2 world or vice versa like acting as an onboarding process for people who might just want a cash product and then they they bootstrap into the rest of the web uh rest of the crypto native world.

Yeah, I think it's both over time. Um it's more of a sequencing thing.

So, uh, in the beginning, I think I suspect that most folks using this product are going to be existing crypto users on Phantom who have really wanted to use their crypto on a more day-to-day basis to spend for things, pay their bills, buy coffee, etc.

And I think once a lot of the network effects there uh start to get driven and uh word of mouth happens then a lot of folks will actually start looking to this especially from an international perspective as a place to uh go first when they want to manage their money.

Um what uh what kind of decisions did you guys make around the stable coins? We just uh on on your new stable coin, we just had Zach on talking about the different every every company can make different decisions around what you know what what kind of uh superpowers they want their stable coin to have.

What what was most important for Phantom? Yeah. So, you know, like most folks, you know, we're really excited about stable coins and the promise of bringing real world utility to crypto. And so, we we initially set out not to build our own stable coin actually, but to build this consumer product that I described first.

And as we went through the process of that, we basically figured out that the stable coin that we needed to build the experience that we wanted didn't really exist on the market. So I think on one end of the spectrum there's USDC. USDC is great. It has a lot of compatibility, liquidity, etc.

But obviously, you know, it doesn't allow you to earn any rewards from the stable coins that you know you're responsible for driving. Mhm. And then on the other end of the spectrum is something like using something like open issuance and creating your own branded stable coin.

So something like MetaMask USD that's supposed to be that basically you're taking a lot more uh operational overhead to really get out there and distribute.

And so really we really wanted to we basically identified that there is this really interesting middle ground option that was not available where you know the vast majority of companies I think are not really in a position to roll their own stable coin.

I think there's a set of very large companies that have a lot of brand equity, a lot of users and a lot of resources to actually take on a lot of that operational overhead. Yeah.

But then there's like sort of this fat middle part of the curve of a lot of companies that want to get into S like want to provide stable coins for their users and earn some rewards from it uh but don't necessarily want to go through all the operational complexity. So we think cash is a really good option for them.

So then that whole through that whole process that's basically how we got to creating this stable coin uh which we view as not necessarily Phantom's stable coin but more of a neutral stable coin in which we're building our own products on top of but anyone else can also build where do you expect the most uh new cash to come from?

Is it somebody in the Phantom app that is bringing assets from regular USD bank account and they want to bring those dollars on chain or you create I mean I imagine you guys uh uh you know Phantom's non-custodial but I imagine you guys like help manage billions of dollars of you know billions of dollars of assets and so are you creating incentives for people to swap into cash?

What does that look like?

So yeah, at first I do believe that most of the cash that's being originated will be originated on our platform because you know we spent the a lot of time building out this product phantom cash product uh that I mentioned and yeah a lot of folk basically the way that you get cash within the app there's there's two different ways.

There's sort of the onchain native way where you take your existing crypto and you swap into cash using uh some sort of DeFi tool or decentralized exchange or something like that.

And then there's sort of the off-chain way where you can actually plug in your bank account, bring your debit card or plug in Apple Pay uh and bring US dollars sort of from the real world into this cash world.

Um, and then as we prove out that model, I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of other consumer apps to do something similar on their side. On the on the retail side, how quickly do you think uh various payment providers will start launching stable coin functionality?

I mean, the the experience that I would want to have is I'm shopping online and instead of pulling out a credit card and having to type in the details or use some saved information that also still requires me to add in like, you know, a code or whatever, I can just, you know, pay and confirm a transaction in Phantom or or another wallet.

How quickly are we from sort of mass adoption from the payment side or the retailer side broadly? So, basically right on the precipice. So, I mean, one of the biggest reasons we decided to work with Bridge on this is because obviously with Bridge comes a lot of partnership with Stripe, right?

They bring a huge merchant network. They're not just an issuer. They're a huge network of merchants, right? And so, you'll actually be able to use cash to buy products on Stripe merchants that's going to be directly supported.

And I think once Stripe really blows the doors open there, a lot of other payment processors are going to start to follow suit once they see, hey, this is a a big pool of potential liquidity that they can tap into. Totally. Super exciting. Uh, congrats on the launch and uh we'll see you again soon, I'm sure.

Thanks so much. Have fun out there. Thanks, Brandon. Back to the timeline we go. Let me tell you about fall first. Generative media platform for