The Future of Finance is OPEN

Arunjay Katakam

A podcast exploring how blockchain, DeFi, and open protocols are democratising global finance. Hosted by Arunjay Katakam and Ian Horne. thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 🎧 Episode 4: Orchestrating Open Finance: Bridging Traditional Banking and Stablecoin Infrastructure

    APR 2

    🎧 Episode 4: Orchestrating Open Finance: Bridging Traditional Banking and Stablecoin Infrastructure

    Episode 4 of The Future of Finance is OPEN features one of the most grounded voices in the stablecoin space. Chris Mason is the co-founder of Orbital, a cross-border payments platform that has been quietly building at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets for eight years, long before most of the industry showed up. Chris spent over 25 years in leadership roles at Citi, First Data, and Worldline. He founded commercial cards in Europe for Citi, ran their cross-border product World Link, and operated a joint venture for First Data. But the corporate politics eventually wore thin, and at 49, he decided to build something of his own. Orbital started as a multi-currency banking platform, pivoted to stablecoins within a year, and has been processing digital dollar payments ever since, bootstrapped, profitable, and now running at a $12 billion annual run rate. This is a conversation about what’s actually happening on the ground, not what’s being announced on stage. US Banks Are Strangling Economies Chris doesn’t mince words on the core problem. US banks have had a stranglehold on dollar clearing, and their risk appetite or lack of it is cutting off entire economies. Countries deemed “high risk” in the emerging markets find themselves locked out of the correspondent banking system. Banks would rather say no to an entire region than invest in the compliance infrastructure to say yes safely. The result is that legitimate businesses in the global south struggle to access the world’s reserve currency. Chris’s view: stablecoins are the working answer, right now, for businesses that need to move dollars across borders without waiting days or paying extortionate fees. Bootstrapped in a World of Billion-Dollar Raises One of the most striking things about Orbital is what they didn’t do. While competitors raised tens and hundreds of millions, Chris bootstrapped. The founders still own over 90% of the business. They raised a modest 6 million Euro after years of self-funding. Chris credits his corporate background, years of operating on tight budgets, zero headcount approvals, and finding creative ways to grow at Citi, with building the discipline that made bootstrapping possible. And he makes a provocative point: with AI now transforming what a team of 130 people can do, not having raised massive rounds may actually be an advantage. The downside? Less marketing firepower than competitors. But Chris says that’s changed in the last 12 months, with quality inbound leads now flowing consistently. The Conversation Is Outrunning the Traction This might be the most important observation in the entire episode. Chris is candid: the hype around stablecoins is currently ahead of the reality. Big banks are under enormous pressure to announce something. Partnerships are being proclaimed that lack regulatory foundations. Companies with no licenses are declaring they’ll bring stablecoins to market. And internally, a lot of what the major banks are doing with stablecoins is intergroup treasury—useful, but not the kind of customer-facing problem-solving that will transform payments. Chris draws a clear line between announcements and execution. Getting a financial institution from initial conversation to actual transactions takes time. You need licenses (Orbital’s Gibraltar licensing alone took two years), crypto-friendly banking partners, RegTech infrastructure, and compliance frameworks. If any single pillar is missing, you can’t transact. The explosion in real-world stablecoin volumes, he believes, is still ahead of us. The Tether Question One of the most interesting threads in the conversation is Chris’s assessment of Tether’s position. While many in the industry are excited about new stablecoin issuers emerging post-GENIUS Act, Chris points out a fundamental challenge: Tether has the global liquidity. If you want to transact in USDC in many emerging markets, the liquidity simply isn’t there. Could Citi or JP Morgan issue stablecoins that overtake Tether’s circulation? Technically, yes. They could do it with US domestic volume alone. But Chris asks the harder question: what problem are they actually solving for customers? Moving internal treasury balances onto a blockchain isn’t the same as enabling a business in Lagos to receive payment from a supplier in Dubai. Dislodging Tether’s network effects will be a serious challenge. People, and entire economies, have embedded themselves in particular payment methods, and history shows they don’t switch easily. The Orbital Index: What the Real Numbers Show Orbital has built a stablecoin index, filtering out high-frequency trading to focus on genuine customer payments. The findings are revealing. Circle dominates North America. Tether dominates most of the rest of the world. There’s been a slow but accelerating migration away from Tron to cheaper blockchains like Binance Smart Chain and Polygon, though Chris notes that users are surprisingly loyal to their preferred chains, even when transaction costs are multiples higher. Perhaps most fascinating is Orbital’s monitoring of stablecoin premiums in emerging markets. Buying USDT with Nigerian Naira, for example, typically costs more than buying traditional US dollars. These premiums vary dramatically and aren’t always explainable. They’re driven by a mix of supply and demand, regulatory uncertainty, and capital controls. As Chris puts it, stablecoins are “the leaky bucket against monetary policy and currency control.” AI and the Future of Compliance Arunjay pushes Chris on a core thesis from the book: can regulatory compliance be 80% automated by AI, with humans in the loop for the remaining 20%? Chris is blunt about the current state of RegTech: he’s unimpressed. Most platforms fall short, particularly when you’re combining crypto and traditional finance. But what Orbital is doing with AI internally is genuinely exciting. They’re mining plausible counterparties by industry, if a trading platform suddenly starts paying charities, that’s a red flag. AI can surface these patterns at a scale and speed that human analysts simply can’t match. His broader point is powerful: blockchain analytics combined with AI creates a compliance capability that’s actually superior to traditional banking. You can see where funds have come from. You can identify wallet ownership patterns through transaction analysis. Transaction monitoring can be taken to “a whole new level” with on-chain data. The irony is that the industry widely perceived as the compliance risk may end up having better compliance tools than the banks that rejected it. Can SWIFT Survive? Chris doesn’t think SWIFT can make the leap to 24/7 real-time settlement. The ownership structure, the DNA of the organisation, he just can’t see it happening. And that, he argues, is precisely why the industry is so excited about stablecoins as cross-border rails. His vision for the future: as emerging market regulators follow the US and Europe in creating clear stablecoin frameworks, foreign exchange markets will begin to mirror fiat markets. Premiums will compress. Transparency will increase. The days of correspondent banks sitting on funds for five days to boost their P&L will end. But he also sees something more radical: a parallel world where digital dollars circulate without ever converting back to fiat. In many emerging markets, this is already happening. The desire to hold stablecoins over local currency is so strong that entire payment flows are staying on-chain. “US banks have had a real stranglehold on US dollars. The banks that do all the clearing are kind of strangling economies, really. The answer, I guess, or one of the answers, could be stablecoin.” The Education Gap If there’s one theme Chris returns to throughout the conversation, it’s education. The crypto industry, he argues, doesn’t help itself. Three different names for every blockchain, intellectualising jargon, and a culture that can be “confusing by design.” Most compliance officers globally still don’t fully understand how stablecoin compliance works. And many CFOs don’t realise you can accept stablecoins and auto-convert to fiat without ever holding digital assets on your balance sheet. The fundamentals of anti-money laundering are the same. It’s just managed differently. And if anything, the transparency of blockchain makes it more powerful, not less. 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode The full conversation also covers Chris’s time building commercial cards across 20 European markets at Citi, the Stripe–Bridge acquisition as a market inflection point, why PayPal’s stablecoin struggles led to a CEO departure, the relationship between monetary policy and stablecoin premiums, and a lively debate about whether emerging market central banks should hold Tether reserves. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts. Key Timestamps * 00:00 — Introduction and Chris’s corporate payments background * 05:00 — Why he left Worldline to co-found Orbital at 49 * 09:00 — Bootstrapping vs. raising: owning 90%+ of the business * 13:00 — Partnerships: ClearBank, Sumsub, and why you can’t do it alone * 18:00 — The conversation is outrunning the traction * 22:00 — Tether’s network effects and the liquidity challenge * 26:00 — The Orbital Stablecoin Index: what the real numbers show * 31:00 — Stablecoin premiums and the “leaky bucket” against monetary policy * 35:00 — AI-powered compliance and mining plausible counterparties * 39:00 — Can SWIFT survive? The case for stablecoin rails * 43:00 — The parallel digital dollar economy in emerging markets Connect Chris Mason — LinkedIn | Orbital The Future of Finance is OPEN. Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox. Have thoughts on cross-border payments, stablecoin adoption, or the future of SWIFT? Reply to this email, we read everything. — Arunjay & Ia

    47 min
  2. 🎧 Episode 3: Where Is the British Pound Stablecoin?

    MAR 5

    🎧 Episode 3: Where Is the British Pound Stablecoin?

    We’re back with Episode 3 of The Future of Finance is OPEN. This week, we sat down with Mike Ringer—Founder of ReStabilise, the UK startup on a mission to put the British Pound on-chain. Mike is a lawyer turned founder. He spent years as a partner and head of the crypto and digital assets group at CMS, one of Europe’s largest law firms, before making the leap to build what the UK has been missing: an institutional-grade, fully regulated GBP stablecoin. His co-founder Dave Lemmens brings equally serious credentials—former UK Head of Product at SWIFT and CIO for Payments at Deutsche Bank. Their thesis starts with a paradox: GBP is the world’s fourth most traded currency, yet it represents a microscopic fraction of the global stablecoin supply. Mike believes the UK’s regulatory gap, not a lack of demand, is what’s held things back. And with the FCA’s new stablecoin regime finally taking shape, that gap is about to close. The British Paradox Here’s the striking fact that opens the conversation: there is essentially no regulated GBP stablecoin in circulation today. The dollar dominates stablecoin supply through Tether and Circle. The euro has some activity under MiCA. But sterling? Almost nothing. It’s not that there’s no demand. It’s that the UK has lacked a regulatory framework. Without clear rules, no serious institutional player has been willing to issue a GBP stablecoin. ReStabilise was founded specifically to fill that gap. “Tokenised Cash” vs. “Crypto Stablecoins” Mike draws a sharp distinction between what he calls “tokenised cash” and the stablecoins most people think of. The difference matters. Tokenised cash, as Mike defines it, is issued by regulated entities, fully backed by reserves held with the Bank of England or in UK gilts, and designed to maintain what the Bank of England calls “singleness of money”, the principle that a pound is a pound is a pound, regardless of who issued it or what form it takes. This is the test that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has laid out: any new form of money must be fully interchangeable with existing forms. One pound in a stablecoin must always equal one pound in a bank account. Mike’s entire business is built around passing that test. The New Regime The regulatory timeline is now concrete. ReStabilise has already submitted its application to the FCA. The formal application gateway opens in September 2026, with the full regime effective from October 2027. The FCA’s approach differs from MiCA in Europe in important ways. The UK wants what Mike describes as a “multi-money” system—central bank digital currencies, tokenised bank deposits, and regulated stablecoins all coexisting and interoperable. It’s not picking winners between these forms; it’s building a framework where they can all work together. One area of tension: capital requirements. The FCA’s proposed “K factor” requires stablecoin issuers to hold capital equal to 2% of their volume. Mike argues this is too high—a point ReStabilise has pushed back on in its regulatory submissions. Getting this number right matters enormously for whether stablecoin issuance can be commercially viable at scale. Editor's note: Since recording this episode, ReStabilise has been confirmed by the FCA as one of only 4 out of 20 applicants accepted into the new Stablecoins Cohort of the FCA's Regulatory Sandbox, a significant milestone that underscores the seriousness of what they're building. You can read the FCA's announcement here. The Business Model How does a regulated stablecoin issuer actually make money? Mike breaks it down into three revenue streams. First, yield on backing assets. When you hold reserves in gilts or central bank deposits, you earn interest. This is the same model Circle uses, and it’s substantial—but as Mike notes, it’s vulnerable to interest rate cycles and isn’t enough on its own. Second, Stablecoins as a Service (SCAS). This is ReStabilise’s white-label offering—building and operating stablecoins for banks, fintechs, and other institutions that want their own branded tokenised money without building the infrastructure themselves. Think of it as stablecoin infrastructure-as-a-service. Third, custody fees. ReStabilise is building as both an issuer and a custodian, which creates additional revenue from holding assets on behalf of clients. The SCAS model is particularly interesting because it addresses a key insight: many banks and fintechs will want to offer tokenised money to their customers but won’t want to build the compliance, technology, and reserve management infrastructure from scratch. Why Public Blockchains Mike is unequivocal: public, permissionless blockchains are the right infrastructure for regulated stablecoins. Not private chains. Not permissioned networks. This might seem counterintuitive for a compliance-focused lawyer, but his reasoning is clear. Public blockchains offer transparency, composability, and network effects that private chains can’t match. And crucially, smart contracts give the issuer all the control they need for compliance—freeze functions, blocklists, and programmable rules are all built into the token itself. The control isn’t at the chain level; it’s at the token level. That’s a subtle but powerful distinction. The Geopolitical Dimension The conversation takes a fascinating turn into geopolitics. The US GENIUS Act includes a reciprocity framework that could allow UK-regulated issuers to issue dollar stablecoins. Mike sees this as a massive opportunity: the UK could become the optimal jurisdiction for multi-currency stablecoin issuance, offering both GBP and USD tokens under a single regulatory umbrella. Meanwhile, the EU’s MiCA framework has been more restrictive, and there are concerns about Euro stablecoins being used as a tool for dollar dominance rather than Euro sovereignty. China is pursuing its own path with the digital yuan. And emerging markets—where stablecoins arguably matter most for financial inclusion—are watching all of this play out. Mike’s view: local currency stablecoins are essential for financial inclusion. A business in Latin America using dollar stablecoins for remittances is still exposed to dollar volatility. True financial empowerment means having access to stable digital representations of your own currency. The Wallet Future The episode closes with a vision that connects directly to our previous guest Tony McLaughlin’s thesis at Ubyx. Mike agrees that we’re heading toward a world where everyone has a digital wallet rather than just a traditional bank account. But he adds an important nuance: this won’t just be crypto-native wallets like MetaMask. Traditional financial institutions—asset managers, banks, custodians—will all offer wallet services. Your HSBC app might soon have your bank account on one tab and your digital wallet on another. The key is interoperability. Different wallets, different chains, different token types—all need to work together seamlessly. Mike is encouraged by the pace of UX improvement but acknowledges there’s still a long way to go. “There’s nothing to stop this vision being realised. You have the brightest people in the world from a technical perspective, you’ve got the regulatory clarity, and you’ve got the consistently demonstrated use case benefits.” The Pluralistic Vision Perhaps the most important point Mike makes is about market structure. He doesn’t want Tether and Circle to dominate stablecoin supply forever. He doesn’t even want ReStabilise to be the only GBP stablecoin issuer. What he wants is a pluralistic market—multiple issuers, multiple currencies, multiple chains, all fitting together in an interoperable ecosystem. Competition drives innovation. And critically, regulation needs to enable this competition without stifling access for the people who benefit most: the unbanked, the underserved, the small business owner in an emerging market who needs a stable digital store of value. It’s a delicate balance. But Mike believes the UK is uniquely positioned to get it right—if regulators resist the urge to over-restrict. 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode The complete conversation goes deeper on the FCA application process, Circle’s S-1 and what it reveals about stablecoin economics, the concept of “second mover advantage,” and why Mike isn’t a fan of wrapped tokens. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts. Key Timestamps * 00:00 — Introduction and Mike’s background * 04:00 — The British paradox: why no GBP stablecoin exists * 09:00 — Tokenised cash vs. crypto stablecoins * 14:00 — The FCA’s new regulatory regime and timeline * 18:00 — Singleness of money and the Bank of England’s test * 22:00 — ReStabilise’s business model: yield, SCAS, and custody * 27:00 — Why public blockchains beat private chains * 31:00 — The GENIUS Act and UK as a multi-currency hub * 35:00 — Geopolitics: dollar dominance, MiCA, and the digital yuan * 39:00 — Financial inclusion and local currency stablecoins * 42:00 — The wallet future and TradFi adoption * 46:00 — Pluralistic markets and the path forward Connect Mike Ringer — LinkedIn | ReStabilise The Future of Finance is OPEN — Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox. Have thoughts on GBP stablecoins, UK regulation, or the multi-currency future? Reply to this email—we read everything. — Arunjay & Ian This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com

    42 min
  3. 🎧 Episode 2: Tony McLaughlin on Why Every Bank Will Soon Offer You a Wallet

    FEB 12

    🎧 Episode 2: Tony McLaughlin on Why Every Bank Will Soon Offer You a Wallet

    We’re thrilled to release Episode 2 of The Future of Finance is OPEN. This week, we sat down with Tony McLaughlin—CEO of Ubyx and author of the Ubyx whitepaper that’s been making waves in banking and crypto circles alike. Tony spent two decades at Citibank leading payments innovation before founding Ubyx. His thesis is simple but profound: tokenized money needs clearing systems, just like checks and cards did. And whoever builds that infrastructure will reshape how money moves globally. The Big Idea: Tokens Need Clearing Here’s the core insight from Tony’s whitepaper: whether you represent promises to pay on paper, clay tablets, relational databases, or tokens—the market structure is predictable. When you have many issuers of tokenized money (stablecoins, tokenized deposits, money market funds) and many parties who need to accept them, you get a many-to-many network. Resolve that bilaterally and you need A × B connections. Build a clearing system and you only need A + B. This is exactly what happened with checks, ACH, and card networks. Tony argues it will happen with tokenized money too. Banks Won’t Sit This Out One of the most striking observations: banks are not going to watch stablecoins eat their lunch. Tokenized deposits are coming. Central banks want them. Commercial banks want them. The question isn’t if but how they’ll compete with stablecoins. Tony’s answer: through the cash management use case. Corporate treasuries need interoperable tokenized deposits that preserve the bank relationship while offering the benefits of blockchain rails. The World of Wallets Your bank account is a “one trick pony”, it only holds one type of instrument: a liability of that bank in a particular currency. But wallets? Wallets can connect to multiple chains and hold multiple types of tokens. Tony’s prediction: Every bank and fintech on the planet will offer wallets connected to many chains. Think about what that means. When your bank offers you a wallet that can hold tokenized deposits, stablecoins, tokenized stocks, and tokenized bonds, all accessible through one interface, the distinction between “TradFi” and “Web3” disappears. “Once everyone’s got a wallet, Web Three and TradFi have merged.” The General-Purpose Technology Always Wins Tony draws a powerful analogy: remember when developing countries had to choose between laying copper telephone lines or going straight to mobile? The same choice faces payment infrastructure today. Countries are still spending hundreds of millions on special-purpose payment rails (ACH, faster payments). But public blockchains are general-purpose technology, they can do everything those special-purpose systems can do, and more. His prediction: traffic will increasingly flow over blockchain rails. Legacy systems won’t disappear overnight, but innovation will happen on the new infrastructure. The Stone Soup Principle When asked how Ubyx plans to build this ecosystem, Tony tells the old folk tale of stone soup. A stranger walks into an impoverished village with nothing but a stone. He starts making “soup” and gradually everyone contributes an onion, a carrot, some meat—until there’s a feast for everyone. The moral: everything needed for responsible adoption of tokenized money already exists in the community. Issuers, banks, fintechs, regulators, wallet providers, blockchain analytics companies. The coordination problem just needs someone to start the pot boiling. What Needs to Be True Rather than focus on blockers, Tony reframes the question: What needs to be true for this future to arrive? The answer: regulated banks and fintechs need to be encouraged to participate on public blockchains. Right now, regulatory caution has prevented them from “setting up shop on these streets”, creating a vacuum filled by unregulated parties. The irony? Having banks present on public blockchains would make those ecosystems safer, not riskier. Like a bank branch making a rough neighbourhood more legitimate. The Five-Year Vision If Ubyx succeeds, what does global money movement look like in 2031? Tony’s vision: the default way of transferring and storing value is a token on a public chain. We won’t know which issuer or chain wins, but the paradigm shift is inevitable. He draws the analogy to alarm clocks, calculators, and Walkmans. They all worked perfectly fine. They all got absorbed into the smartphone anyway. “Just because something works today doesn’t mean it doesn’t get replaced.” 🎙️ Listen Now The complete conversation covers much more: the business model sustainability question (what happens when interest rates drop?), why “singleness of money” matters, the UFO financing thought experiment, and Tony’s take on whether Circle and Coinbase are really building “open” systems. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts. Key Timestamps - 00:00 — Introduction and book overview - 02:00 — The Ubyx whitepaper: tokenized money needs clearing - 08:00 — Banks, tokenized deposits, and the wallet future - 13:00 — Why wallets beat accounts - 19:00 — Business model sustainability beyond interest income - 23:00 — General-purpose vs. special-purpose technology - 29:00 — Interoperability and the many-to-many problem - 35:00 — Challenging Tony: aren’t we seeing walled gardens? - 39:00 — Milestones for the next 12 months - 43:00 — The stone soup principle - 48:00 — Five-year vision: tokens on chains as the default Connect with Tony Tony McLaughlin — LinkedIn | Ubyx Additional reading: Ubyx white paper. What’s Coming Next Episode 3 features Mike Ringer, Founder & CEO of ReStabilise—the UK startup fighting to put the British Pound on-chain. Here’s the paradox: GBP is the world’s fourth most traded currency, yet it represents a microscopic fraction of the global stablecoin supply. Why has the UK lagged so far behind? And with new FCA regulations finally taking shape in 2026, is there an opening for a “digital pound” that plays by different rules than the offshore giants? The Future of Finance is OPEN — Subscribe to get new episodes delivered to your inbox. Have thoughts on clearing systems, tokenized deposits, or the wallet future? Reply to this email—we read everything. — Arunjay & Ian This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com

    51 min
  4. 🎧 Episode 1: Christian Catalini on Libra, Stablecoins, and the Battle Between Open and Closed

    FEB 5

    🎧 Episode 1: Christian Catalini on Libra, Stablecoins, and the Battle Between Open and Closed

    For our debut episode, we sat down with Christian Catalini, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at LightSpark, co-creator of Libra/Diem and former Chief Economist of the Diem Association at Meta, founder of the MIT Crypto Economics Lab, and research scientist at MIT Sloan. Christian was at the centre of one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape global payments. Now he’s applying those hard-won lessons to build something new on top of Bitcoin. This conversation covered the real lessons from Libra, why the stablecoin hype needs tempering, what Universal Money Addresses could unlock, and a concept Christian calls the “unbrokered”, a problem that goes well beyond the unbanked. The Libra Story: “We Were Just Early” Christian was candid about what went wrong with Libra. Despite assembling more than two dozen tech companies into a consortium, the project could never achieve the level of decentralisation and trust that exists in networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. The key learning, as he put it: if you want to build the future of finance, it has to be open. Any platform with a single architect, whether through soft power or corporate sponsorship, leads to a worse equilibrium than where you started. But he also pushed back on the narrative that Libra was a failure. With three billion users on Facebook’s platforms, the distribution was real. And the project’s ripple effects were enormous, it spooked central banks globally into accelerating CBDC research. Christian noted wryly that only a handful of countries have actually launched a CBDC since, while stablecoins have taken off. Cooling Down the Stablecoin Hype One of the most substantive parts of the conversation was Christian’s analysis of the stablecoin business model problem. Today’s issuers like Tether and Circle look enormously profitable, but that’s a function of high interest rates and limited competition. Once legislation like the Genius Act enforces fungibility, the principle that every regulated stablecoin should be as good as any other, the space gets commoditised. Issuers who can’t control distribution will struggle, and he expects the winners to be neobanks and fintechs who use stablecoins as part of their product stack rather than standalone issuers. He also challenged the narrative of inevitable dollar dominance through stablecoins. While dollar-denominated stablecoins dominate today, Christian argued that any stablecoin perceived as a threat to monetary sovereignty will face regulatory pushback as Libra did. He expects a sprawling ecosystem of domestic stablecoins to emerge, with peso-denominated, real-denominated, and other local currency stablecoins serving markets where borrowing in dollars makes no sense. Universal Money Addresses: Payments as Simple as Email The conversation turned to LightSpark’s work on Universal Money Addresses (UMAs), an open protocol built on DNS that lets users send money across different applications and institutions as easily as sending an email. Today, you can’t send money between Cash App and Venmo because they’re competing closed systems. UMA is designed to break that pattern, handling addressing, compliance, and FX quoting in an open, interoperable way. Christian stressed that UMA is fully open source and deliberately simple. Customers including SoFi and Nubank are already implementing it, and the protocol handles travel rule compliance and KYC information exchange without centralising control, an important distinction from competitors who solve interoperability by putting themselves at the centre of every transaction. The “Unbrokered” Problem Perhaps the most powerful framing in the episode was Christian’s concept of the “unbrokered.” We talk endlessly about the unbanked, but most of the world also lacks access to any form of investment, no stocks, no money market funds, no treasury bills. As Christian described it, working and saving is normal in a country like the United States, but the vast majority of the world doesn’t have those options, and the wealth gap keeps widening as a result. This is where tokenised assets, stablecoins, and non-custodial wallets converge. The future, as Christian sees it, is allowing someone anywhere on the planet to buy a fraction of a share in a company and participate in the global financial system. It’s not just unbanked, it’s also unbrokered. And solving both requires open, permissionless infrastructure. Bitcoin as Transit Layer and the Spark Network A surprising thread in the conversation was LightSpark’s use of Bitcoin, not stablecoins, as a transit layer for cross-border payments. Christian explained that Bitcoin’s deep global liquidity actually makes it more efficient than the “stablecoin sandwich” approach where you route through a dollar stablecoin. Because you’re moving in and out of Bitcoin quickly, volatility exposure is minimal, and the SoFi customers using this for US-Mexico transfers don’t even know Bitcoin is involved. He also described the evolution from Lightning to Spark, a new protocol that scales Bitcoin’s core concepts to potentially billions of non-custodial users, something Lightning’s enterprise-grade architecture wasn’t designed for. This matters enormously for financial inclusion, where non-custodial solutions may be the safest option in countries with unreliable institutions. Redesigning Finance from Scratch When asked what an ideal financial system would look like, Christian’s answer was characteristically principled: open permissionless networks built on credible base layer neutrality, with low fees, scalability, privacy, and a protocol for compliance. Without compliance, he argued, this never goes mainstream. But once those ingredients are in place: “I think you have the foundation of the internet of money. It’s an abused term, but fundamentally that’s kind of what we need. And from there on, I think entrepreneurs all around the globe will figure out the rest.” — Christian Catalini 🎙️ Listen Now The full episode is available above. Subscribe to get new episodes delivered directly to your inbox. Additional reading: * Why open networks win, by Christian Catalini and Robert Hackett * Why Everyone Is Wrong About Stablecoins, By Christian Catalini * Bitcoin Reserves Won’t Secure America’s Future—Only A Platform Play Will, By Christian Catalini What’s Coming Next This episode set the stage for the themes we’ll be exploring throughout the series, the tension between open and closed in finance, the gap between stablecoin hype and business model reality, the role of competition in driving financial inclusion, and the infrastructure being built to make all of it work. We have more conversations lined up with people working at the sharp end of these questions. Next up, we're joined by Tony McLaughlin, a 30-year veteran of payments, FX, and corporate cash management at leading financial institutions, and the originator of numerous high-profile digital currency projects. If Christian gave us the builder's perspective on open infrastructure, Tony brings the institutional lens. That conversation is one you won't want to miss. Join the Conversation Subscribe to get each new episode delivered to your inbox. Share this with anyone interested in the future of finance. And reply to this email with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future guests. The future of finance is OPEN. Let’s explore it together. — Arunjay & Ian This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com

    46 min
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A podcast exploring how blockchain, DeFi, and open protocols are democratising global finance. Hosted by Arunjay Katakam and Ian Horne. thefutureoffinanceisopen.substack.com

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