Banking’s Endgame: Stablecoins Take Over Every Checking Account | MetaLend
Summary
Future of Banking: Banks will need to adopt stablecoins to remain competitive, as stablecoins offer faster, decentralized, and more efficient payment systems.
Regulatory Developments: The Genius Act provides a comprehensive framework for stablecoin adoption in the US, which is expected to disrupt global finance by enabling direct, instantaneous transfers.
Metalend's Role: Metalend optimizes yield for users by routing deposits across various lending protocols, offering up to 10% yield on stablecoins, and ensuring transparency and control over funds.
Security and Transparency: Metalend emphasizes security through diversification of deposits and self-custodial smart contracts, addressing concerns from past security incidents.
Global Financial Inclusion: Tokenizing stocks and other real-world assets on the blockchain will enable global access to financial markets, increasing borrowing and lending opportunities.
Payment Systems Evolution: The widespread adoption of stablecoins could lead to high-yield DeFi checking accounts, transforming everyday transactions and financial management.
Investment and Growth: Metalend, backed by Panta and other investors, is focused on creating user-friendly blockchain solutions, with plans for further fundraising to expand their offerings.
Transcript
At a high level, every bank is going to have to adopt this or they're going to get taken over by a neo bank. And what that means is within the next 5 or 10 years, everyone who holds deposits in banks are either knowingly or un unknowingly going to be holding those deposits in stable coins. The future of payment systems is about to change forever. What does our future look like when everything is faster, more decentralized, and easier to control? and we don't have to rely on centralized parties anymore to custody our savings and checkings and what happens when we can actually earn high yields on our checkings account on the blockchain. This is the future of finance and we'll be talking about this theme with Sujie Singh and Nikil Bardage, co-founders of Metalendent. Very interesting project that's working on exactly this issue. This is a sponsored interview, so do your own due diligence. This video is not investment advice. Welcome to the show, co-founders of Medeland. Glad to have you here. So, let's start with future adoption of stable coins. As you know, the Genius Act recently passed. It's a federal law that creates a comprehensive framework for how uh payment stable coins and digital assets uh would be accepted in the US. It's groundbreaking. It's very comprehensive. Let's talk about how this is going to disrupt global finance and the use of stable coins worldwide. How will our lives change? Yeah. Um I'll take that. It's very exciting times um when it comes to the emergence of uh stable coins and the clarity that we finally have um on stable coins and the usage of stable coins. And this is the perfect time for it to now segue into the masses. Right? There's a ton of primitives uh that live on the blockchain, financial primitives that stable coins enable uh think lending, think borrowing, think uh payment transferring and blockchain technology has been emerging and being developed for the last 5 to 10 years and not you know the day-to-day doesn't really feel it and haven't felt it but now they will because of the emergence of stable coins. So you have the on-ramps, you have the off-ramps, we'll get into that a little later. And you have interoperability, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of hard work that's been built over the last 5 to 10 years. And now regulatory clarity uh that'll bring in a lot of fiat into blockchain. And we'll get into all of the benefits. Uh at a high level, what we are expecting to see is honestly every bank in the US is going to launch their own stable coin. The simple reason why is that stable coins enable direct transfers instantaneously. So in a world previously today where you might have to wire somebody and wait a few days for the funds to arrive, stable coins allow that to happen in seconds if not less at no cost. Um and so at a high level, every bank is going to have to adopt this or they're going to get taken over by a neo bank. And what that means is within the next 5 or 10 years, everyone who holds deposits in banks are either knowingly or un unknowingly going to be holding those deposits in stable coins. Either they're going to hold it directly in crypto wallets or their bank will be holding it for them in stable coins. What What do you mean unknowingly? Can the bank take your deposits, put them on the blockchain without your consent? Uh to some degree they can, right? That depends how they're holding the deposits. If they want to be able to allow users to uh send money instantaneously and offer those features that the newer neo banks are offering, they can do that. And you know, unknowingly and consent, it it really comes down to like terms of service and accepting uh those sorts of things, which a lot of people obviously don't read terms of service. They just opt in. But this is the new financial infrastructure uh that Nikil was mentioning where stable coins are going to become the primary way that even banks hold their assets for users because they they're going to need to offer these services in order to keep their customer base. Okay. So, uh I'll switch back to Nick. So yes, this is a common uh theme I've heard amongst a lot of not just crypto adopters but even economists who point to the fact that banks face obsolescence if they don't either adopt uh blockchain payment rails like stable coins or improve their existing financial payment rails like Swift to make it as fast as uh stable coins transactions. However, here's a here's a here's a caveat here. I just went to Starbucks, right? I bought a coffee. I didn't pay with stable coins because my bank doesn't allow me to hold stable coins. It allows me to hold fiat. And so when I go to Starbucks and I use my phone, Apple pay to pay. It's through fiat. It's not through a blockchain. So until vendors start accepting blockchain, this is a technology that isn't really relevant to the regular person. It's just a B2B payment rail. How would you respond to that? Yeah. Uh the time is now. Uh we've partnered with MetaMask who has a a Mastercard debit card available. It's launching the US in a few weeks. It's available in Canada. Latam hundreds of millions of dollars are being processed to merchants. Any merchant that accepts Mastercard seamlessly takes stable coins on the other end of it. And the beauty here is there's $7 trillion at the moment sitting in US checkings accounts. Just US, not even just the world. $7 trillion sitting in checkings accounts earning 0% interest. As we all know, traditionally checking accounts, people don't think of them as interest bearing, but they should be. Blockchain enables that, and I'll walk through that flow. Um, people need to save some money in their day-to-day in checkings accounts. Not everything gets put into the market, CDs, money markets or stocks. You got to go buy the coffee as you mentioned. Now, till the point of purchase, that dollar should be making you interest. And that's where we come in with a high earned checkings account backed by stable coins and spendability, seamless spendability with the Mastercard and MetaMask. Um they the mer merchants don't even notice a difference. It's settled in the background to fiat. But the the user is holding stable coin and it's earning this morning up to 10% on that stable coin. Wait, so you're talking about Okay, so let's switch gears now. You're talking about Metalland. You're earning 10% yield on metallend. That's correct. Okay. So, let's look at let's back up before we talk about the yield. How does this work? Yeah. So, I can dive into that. I think to understand how the yield here is generated, it's important to understand what are called lending protocols on the blockchain. Very simply, it is essentially like margin uh margin loans. So, like you can take a loan out against your stocks. Lending protocols on the blockchain allow you to do that with crypto. So, let's say you have one Bitcoin uh and you want to take out some money to renovate your house. You can go to a lending protocol like A or Morpho and deposit your collateral into a smart contract and then take out a loan. The person that's providing you that loan are actually lenders. They put their money into a pool and a a borrower deposits their collateral and they take out a loan and it's an overcolateralized loan. So at most you can take 80% uh as a loan against the value of your bitcoin and then obviously the risk for the borrower is that if bitcoin's value comes down a the protocol automatically sells some of their bitcoin to pay back the loan to ensure that lenders are whole. So that's how yield works on the blockchain. Now, the problem is that there's a lot of these lending protocols like Ave. And if you're a person that just wants to earn interest on your dollars, you actually have to pick first a stable coin, which as we mentioned, there's increasingly more and more of them. Uh second, you have to pick a chain like Ethereum, Salana, um Base, etc. And then lastly, you have to pick a lending protocol like an A or Morpho. And so there's hundreds of options for people to decide where do they want to deposit their funds. And the other thing is the rates for each of these pools changes in real time. And so the way that metal end generates yield for users is we sit on top of all of these protocols. You deposit your funds on a metal end and we find the highest pool for you and we optimize and uh rotate that weekly to make sure that you're earning as much as possible. At a very high level, how would you explain metalend to a 10-year-old? I mean what you're just describing uh Sujie, it sounds like a bank. I mean, is it just a virtual bank? Um, in some ways it operates as a bank, but the difference is when you're using a bank, you actually don't know what's happening with your money and where it's going, right? There's fractional banking. Uh, they only need a whole 10% of your deposit in the bank. And then they're writing their own loans, you know, some could be mortgages, etc., and they're making their own risk assessments. Here, it's using open protocols on the blockchain. And within Metal, a user can actually go in and configure their own settings to say, "Hey, A is, you know, the biggest protocol. They're the ones that I've heard of the most. I only want my funds to sit there." So, imagine if you could go do that with your bank, right? You could go and say, "Uh, I want to earn, first of all, 10 times more than savings accounts are giving right now. But secondly, uh you can see exactly where your funds are going to earn you yield and change it if you feel uncomfortable uh with where that's going and what collateral is backing it. Okay. Uh Nick, anything to add to that before we move on? Yeah, just one piece to add is it's a global system now, right? One, the reason interest rates are so much higher when it comes to traditional US banks, Fedbacked uh rates plus or minus 1% generally in this case, it's pure supply and demand globally. I think it's really important to understand that there is demand to borrow. Hence, there's higher interest rates on the blockchain because global emerging markets don't have any option. They don't have the sophisticated banking systems in Latam and in in East Asia. But those users now you're seeing more and more convert their payrolls, their paychecks into stable coins, a to get out of the deflationary currency. We've been seeing that for years. But now once they're on chain, they have all of the financial primitives such as borrowed lending and now you have a global borrowing demand that the decentralized financial system aggregates and that's where we come in and have a layer and just again tie it fully back to that coffee you mentioned. Now you can go get a coffee with that USD anywhere where they take Mastercard. Right. I'm just going to address some probably viewer concerns at this point. Uh because this is a new project and we've seen uh the risks associated with new projects. We will get into the details of how this works to maybe swatch some viewer comments and concerns. However, the first parallel that maybe some people have already drawn, myself included, is this sounds a lot like some of the um instruments we've seen in 2021. Celsius ran something similar. It was later re revealed to be a Ponzi scheme and we know what happened to the company. It collapsed and it was sued for being a Ponzi scheme. Let me just share my screen here. Uh Celsius CEO Mashinsky, this is on um an article here dated 2021 on Block Works. Uh to be fair to the author at the time, nobody really knew exactly what was going on before the scheme was revealed and the company was sued. But anyway, the 8.8% yield we pay on stable coins is true value of USD. Nearly one million people have deposited a combined $20 billion into DeFi lending and saving pool pro uh protocol Celsius was with $1.2 billion being added every month. Um this also promises a payout on yield 8.88% as of this particular article but I knew at the time uh this the yield did vary depending on the time and the instrument that you invested in. uh on stable coins between 0.5 to 13% on other types of digital assets from Bitcoin. We know now that this was a Ponzi scheme. Most of this was paid by using other user deposits. This sounds a lot on the surface like what you guys are offering. How are you any different? Yeah, it's a great question. Very fair question. Uh one thing to actually correct in this uh article which I think has been referred to later is here they're referring to Celsius as a DeFi protocol. That's actually not true. Celsius was centralized uh and a centralized service and that's really important because what that means is when users put their funds into Celsius they had no idea where it was going right that's why it was able to be a Ponzi scheme it was a black box people deposited their funds and in the case of US dollars that were deposited they were then taking those funds and basically operating like a hedge fund they were investing in the crypto markets and giving the return back to users until obviously the market crashed and they lost to all the user deposits. In the case of the digital assets mentioned here, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the yield they offered on that. The interesting thing is they were actually using the lending protocols I just mentioned, a etc. to take out loans against user deposits and then speculating with that. So when the market crashed, it was actually these DeFi protocols, the real DeFi protocols like a that liquidated the actors like Celsius and forced them to take their losses and they were then unable to pay back uh depositors because obviously they were doing things that were very illegal in terms of speculating with user uh user funds and user deposits. Metal is entirely different. Uh when a user deposits on meand you see exactly where your funds go. You can deposit and withdraw at any time and you can update uh your configuration to make sure you're controlling where your funds are going. On top of that, it is entirely self-custodial. So everything is built with smart contracts. Nobody at Metal End or even the protocols where your funds add up in can touch your funds. It's tied one to one with your wallet with your private key. You're the only person that can deposit and withdraw. You're the only person that can update the configuration to determine where your funds go to earn you yield. And as I mentioned, you can see it at all times. Here's where my funds are now. They're in this pool. This pool is, for example, uh taking as collateral Coinbase wrap Bitcoin and driving yield. And if you want to withdraw, update your configuration, you can do that at any point in time. You said 10% yield, correct? Is what Metal is offering. Yeah. And to clarify, it's up to 10% yield and it's variable. So I think that's the biggest difference the just in that article right there where they guaranteed 8.8% as a fixed number is because they were they were hedge funding it right they were saying we'll get to 8.8%. When it comes to DeFi and Metallend, it is a variable rate based on supply and demand purely. It's so 10% is this morning. If borrowing goes down, right, if borrowing against USDC in this case in the stable coin goes down globally, that interest rate will drop. In the last year, we've seen it be anywhere between 6 1/2 to 11%. Um, and it's hovering right now between 9 to 10%. But it's purely variable um based on supply and demand of the protocols. Okay. Can you just explain one more time how the yield is generated and just step by step walk through the mechanism of this yield generation here? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So essentially the way that it works, let's say I'm somebody in um El Salvador. I have Bitcoin. I don't want to hold my local currency because I don't trust it and I need some funds to renovate my home. I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I don't want to pay taxes. So, what I can do, especially because I may not trust the banking system in my country, I can go to a website like a or Morpho and those websites allow me to connect my wallet, deposit my wrapped Bitcoin in this case. So, Coinbase has wrapped Bitcoin. There's other companies that also wrap Bitcoin to bring them into Ethereum and take a loan against it. For easy numbers, let's say my Bitcoin is worth 100K. I know right now it's about 110. um I can take up to 80% of that value. So if Bitcoin's at 100K, I can borrow up to $80,000 in stable coins and I'm paying interest on that, which as Nikquil mentioned is a variable interest. The risk there is that if I take my max borrow, which is that $80,000, and then Bitcoin drops even to 95, uh, A will automatically with their smart contracts sell a portion of my Bitcoin slightly below market rate to pay back my loan to get me back to 80%. Okay. So, you're paying an interest on the loan and then the yield is, I guess, owing to the lenders. Exactly. So, it's a two-sided marketplace. There's borrowers on one end who lock up their collateral and take out this overcolateralized loan. And there's lenders on the other end who are depositing stable coins and earning interest that's being paid by the borrower. And then Coinbase or A just makes money through the spread, I guess. Yes. Exactly. Through the spread. Coinbase and a make the money on the spread. So, exactly how a bank operates lending. Exactly. except this is uh smart contracts on the blockchain as opposed to people making decisions and determinations about hey this is trustworthy collateral etc. There's no humans involved in the loop here. It's all code. It's all reading financial data of what is the price of Bitcoin, what is the price of Ethereum, etc. when it comes to that asset and up on a blockby-block basis. Well, if if there is Okay, so Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Let's just take Coinbase as an example. So if Coinbase is is uh is the custodian of my crypto and they're lending it out and hence I'm if I'm borrowing and I'm being p I'm paying a yield and then if I'm also staking a protocol or in this case uh depositing stable coins I'm being paid a yield. Well, uh, the question I have is how do I know if, let's say, I want to withdraw everything. They're not going to experience, let's say, bankr run scenario where they don't have enough to pay out all the depositors. Yeah. Um, on on the Coinbase side, yes, it is an exchange, centralized exchange, but on the decentralized side, there are liquidators. Um, all of this is automatic. So if there's let's say a draw down right for the collateral and and people want to see back their loans and all the lenders want to get their funds back it's always overcolateralized so there's always enough in the pool for all of the lenders to retrieve their deposits and that's the beauty of it being overcolateralized and what maintains it to be overcolateralized is the third arm of this which is liquidations right there's an army of liquidators mostly running bots on on the blockchain As soon as someone gets close to their limits, they sell their collateral. And what's that's the beauty of you here. It's frag it's it's all fractionalized, right? So, you don't need to sell a full Bitcoin. You could sell as little as, you know, $100 of that Bitcoin where there's a liquidator waiting and it keeps you under the limits at all times. Okay, I see. Now, uh the next question I have is why do we need metalin? Like where does metal end fit into this picture? Why can't I directly just generate a yield through Coinbase or a for your examples? Yeah, you know, it's a great question and really one of the initial things that we're solving here is fragmentation. So, you think about um lending and where you want to deposit your funds. As I said, a user needs to make three big decisions. One is what stable coin are you going to hold? The second one is what chain are you going to move your funds to? And then thirdly, which protocol? We've talked about a there's many more. There's actually hundreds of different pools. Uh so a user could put USDC in a on the base chain or they could put a different stable coin like USDT on the Binance chain on Morpho, etc. There's so many different places and the problem is every single one of them has a variable moving rate. So it becomes very hard to optimize your money movement. And that's what Metal End does. We sit on top of hundreds of these pools and we route your money for you to maximize your earnings. On top of that, we let you see and control exactly where your money goes. So, if you, for example, don't feel comfortable with USDT because maybe they haven't passed uh your smell test or I know they're still working on getting compliant with the new Genius Act requirements. You can say that stable coin or I don't want my funds to go onto this chain or this protocol and we take your decisions. It's encoded on the blockchain with your private key and your money routes exactly where you want it to go. Are there auditing systems to proof how much are you know how much money or uh how many coins are in reserve? Yeah, that's the beauty of the blockchain. It's all visible. Um all reserves are onchain. You can see all of the on the ledger uh reserves, proof of reserves. Um there's third parties that validate proof of reserves. Uh those are emerging securities companies that also do that. And the one one more thing I'd like to add just as an analogy, you know, you asked why can't I just go directly to a protocol and earn yield. Yeah. The analogy there would be, you know, in the traditional finance world going to picking a treasury bill, right? Let's say like, hey, I'm going to pick treasury bill. that's giving this yield. Now you have a banking layer on top that makes that very seamless for you and that's where mealin comes in. There's also an aspect of making a seamless spending with it. But yeah. Okay. Uh users are concerned about security. There's been a number of hacking incidents in the last year. By bit saw the biggest hack in history in February with over a billion dollars worth of Ethereum stolen. Uh they did resolve the issue. A lot of it was returned. I'll switch over to my screen now. Uh, Melind did also experience a security incident. This is on the Melind Twitter page. We experienced a security incident on February 1st, 2025, incidentally coinciding close to or you know close to the bybit hack incident which resulted in the unauthorized withdrawal from our lending pool. I won't read the entire post, but what's next or highest priority right now is patching these vulnerabilities and making affected users whole. Uh I will note that many users did appreciate the team's efforts in addressing this issue right away. So what happened here? Let's just address what happened in this particular security incident and what Metal is doing overall to enhance security. I'll take that. Uh we used to before being an aggregator earn and spend uh account we used to have our own protocol similar to a compound um our own protocol. In transitioning away from that uh we did have a hack uh where we made every user whole. We patched we made it whole. We've sunset that protocol. It was during the moment of transitioning away from that. There was a missed uh security audit. We used third party security audits which is very common. There was a missed audit here that uh revealed a vulnerability during that audit. U but again our priority was to make every user whole which we did. We now uh don't run a protocol. We are a UX routing layer on top of protocols. We do take security extremely extremely uh we take we take really priority in security. Uh but again we don't have those risk that a and that's why it's so necessary to have the layer we have because protocols are focused on security. They're focused on liquidity. They're focused on bank runs. The questions you've asked. They're not focused on user experience and adopting the masses. The masses will not go directly to these protocols. They will go through UX layers such as ours or they'll go through wallets where we have partnerships with MetaMask wallet and Coinbase wallets. They're going to come in through those in those points because it's so much easier. Uh we still get audits done every month, multiple times a month, we get audits done, but again we don't custody any funds. We don't manage any liquidity. Uh that was a transitory period. And and David to answer your broader question in terms of like DeFi, right? Even Bybit as you mentioned had the biggest hack in history. Uh DeFi of course has had risks and it's unfortunate every now and again you hear about a hack and our plan for this is actually to diversify deposits right the the key issue here is a lot of users when you put your funds somewhere a lot of your eggs are in one basket right and what we're building actually is to diversify your deposits. So, a user can come in, deposit $100,000, and $1,000 will each get spread out across various different protocols. That means if something does happen, a black swan event like any of these hacks, only 1% of your funds are at risk. And because of that diversification, we can lower risk. And with lower risk, we're looking at actually being able to offer insurance for our user deposits as well. So, that's something that's in the works for us. We're really excited about it and we think that it's actually going to revolutionize uh DeFi and bring adoption from the masses for sure. And and just in terms of authorization and and uh access to your own accounts, something that the bipit hack revealed to the world is that even multi-IG authorization has failed and has been proven to fail in this particular instance. Uh how would you address this concern? Yeah. So one very common thing uh is for example in the case of a and a lot of these larger protocols is once they built the product then they actually get rid of the multi-IG and burn the keys and so what that means is uh you can't update that version of the product that that product those smart contracts are set in stone they can never change there's never even a multisig that was used in the initial um phase of development that can't be used anymore and so this is a very common practice. I don't think it was a practice. Unfortunately, at Bybit, I think that was maybe one of their treasury accounts. I'm not exactly sure, but when it comes to these smart contracts protocols on the blockchain, they actually remove the ability for even a multi-IG to update contracts. What's that means is that once it's fully audited and it's out there, there's no way to change it. It's it's out there and it's set in stone. Okay. So, diversifying deposits is one way to enhance DeFi security overall. Uh you also talked to me offline about tokenizing stocks as being collateral. What can you tell us about that process? Yeah, I'll take that. Um with the emergence of tokenizing stock, going back to how Suji was talking about the mechanics of collateral and borrowing and lending that creates the yield. The collateral that's going to be coming on chain will be a lot more stable, liquid, right? Think stocks, think you know real world assets that now can be used as collateral to borrow against in the past if there was a risk on for lenders that was the collateral wasn't strong enough potentially if they felt that it wasn't strong enough think maybe altcoins right that have a high volatility not enough liquidity would a lender be like hey I don't really want that collateral backing my interest now we got assets coming on from the real world that will be, you know, we're talking tons of liquidity, stable, can easier be used as price prediction and it's really going to enable stronger yields, stronger stable. Okay. Uh, anything to add, Sujief? Yeah, I mean, I just think that the other thing that we will see with this, obviously, there's people outside of the US that want to be able to buy Apple stock, want to be able to buy Tesla stock. Those people don't have access today and tokenized stocks are going to give them access. In fact, it's also going to give people in the US 24/7 access to stock trading, which is a big feature for Robin Hood and all exchanges want to replicate that. The way to get there is tokenizing stocks. But with the global adoption of uh US stocks and just global a global stock market, you're going to see a big increase in borrowing as well, right? Margin, etc. These protocols, a morpho, etc. They're very simple to use. they're on DeFi and with Metalend we're going to be able to make it very easy for everyone to access that and have their funds move to the highest yield place right now. Uh what is the future of payment systems in the next 5 to 10 years? Let's suppose um and I'm not saying it will or it won't but let's just suppose that your system takes mainstream adoption. Everyone will have some sort of DeFi checkings account that is high yield in nature. uh which is admittedly something that we don't really usually have in our banks, but let's suppose we have that. Um what will the world look like in this scenario? Yeah. Um we're bullish on the world looking like stable coins being at the center of transactions, whether that's transferring funds to your family member offshore or using that to purchase a coffee. Uh, stable coins are more efficient, they're quicker, they're cheaper, they're faster, and they provide you exposure to the globalized economy, which is the blockchain. And we feel at this and SG mentioned at the top of the call, more and more stable coins are coming for that exact reason because these institutions know putting a stable coin at the middle of all of their transactions is the way to get more adoption, therefore also more yield. Again, all of the financial primitives open up. Um, I'll go back to the the key data point I mentioned at the top of the call, which is $7 trillion. There's no reason that money shouldn't be earning all the way till the point of purchase. That we feel like should be a common table stakes use case. And we're talking months, not years for that to happen. Right. Okay. And and just taking a step back here. Um again for the layman watching this who who may be understanding what you're saying but also going back to my example today I purchased coffee with my credit card. The payment was instantaneous. Um I understand that stable coins are inherently faster than wire transfers. But why would an average person opt to use uh this particular system versus just using their credit card and swiping on a payment um uh platform? Yeah, I mean it it's very simple. Um you're right. your credit card work. But if you sign up with the MetaMask card and you take the money that's sitting in your checkings account, you move it to Metallend, you can earn, let's say it's $10,000, you can be earning 10% on that $10,000. And then you can go with your Mastercard backed MetaMask card and buy that same coffee. You're going to get 3% cash back on the coffee and you're going to get 10% on all the money in your checking account uh until the point of purchase. Okay. Well, great. uh I want to just take a few minutes to talk about your background and uh how uh your professional journey evolved uh to the point where you became co-founders of this project. Yeah, on my end uh I was at Amazon for 4 years prior to meand uh particularly the ring engineering team. I was the right hand to the CTO. We have a global team. We were, you know, I was responsible for hiring, product development, uh, the full software life cycle. And really the segue for me into uh, blockchain and DeFi was we had a huge set of users in Latin America, specifically Argentina uh, sorry, not users, engineers. We had a team of about 200 engineers for Amazon uh, and ring in Latin America. And what they would do immediately is when they received their payroll, they would convert it to stables or they would convert it to crypto. A to get away from deflationary risk on their local currency and B again to open up all of the financial primitives that are you know like the US has borrow lending and so forth, leverage earning against it. And then I went down the rabbit hole of the blockchain. I was fascinated. Uh a little bit of personal background between Sajiv and I. At that time it was co we were roommates on a whiteboard talking about blockchain and decentralized finance. Uh we ripped apart a and compound and all of their algorithms and we were fascinated by it. Started personally using DeFi as a lender to make some money. We were holding Bitcoin and Ethereum as you know just personal interest and yeah have immense personal trust with Saj. We've traveled the world together. Again, we built Medeland to start as roommates. He's married now, so we're not roommates, but um that's the story on how Metal started. Backed by Panta. Um thanks to that team, they've really been a strong advocate. Um as has a lot of our partners like MetaMask and a few others exciting exciting partners coming. Yeah. And on my end, uh as Nicole mentioned, also have a web 2 background. Uh started off at Zip Recruiter, the jobs company, ran marketplace products there. uh and then transitioned to Bird, the scooter company, where I also ran uh product and marketplace. Eventually ended up running growth at Bird and was in charge of basically making sure vehicles were in the right place at the right time to maximize rides and revenue for the business. And so while it's a very different type of product and business, it's actually very similar in terms of the supply demand issue moving uh in this case assets to places where they can earn the highest yield whenever there's supply and demand imbalance. Uh, on a personal note, I actually grew up in Mexico City. So, from age 3 to 18, I grew up in Mexico City. And my whole family for the longest time was earning uh in pesos. There are business owners down there, but they were always trying to think about how do we hold this everything that we're earning in uh an asset that can last for the long term. So, US dollars, gold, etc. I think Nicole and I are both really excited about the products that we're building, being able to impact the lives of everyone that we've talked about from his engineering team in Argentina to my whole family and everyone that I know in Mexico and make it easy for them to hold stable coins, earn high yield, and be able to spend on the day-to-day. Do you both have engineering backgrounds? Yeah, yes, we do. And when you say that you're backed by Panta, can you just disclose um you know the fundraising process, roughly how much was funded and any other notable partners that you may have? Yeah. Um Panta led our seed round. Uh we did a seed round at $5 million that they led. Uh Collab and Currency also co-led with that. Since then, Panta's also doubled down on us and has done another check. Um we'll be doing another fundraising within the next 6 months. Uh we're focused on really every day asking our team and you've asked a few times during this uh interview. Can our moms use this product? Can and we ask the team that every day. Um that's our northstar here is to enable our moms to be able to use this product and really benefit from the advantages of the blockchain. After we've nailed that experience, uh we're close. We'll be doing another fundraising round. Well, I appreciate the time, gentlemen. Thank you very much for uh educating us on stable coins and metallend and uh good luck to your venture. Appreciate it. And uh we'll talk again soon. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Banking’s Endgame: Stablecoins Take Over Every Checking Account | MetaLend
Summary
Transcript
At a high level, every bank is going to have to adopt this or they're going to get taken over by a neo bank. And what that means is within the next 5 or 10 years, everyone who holds deposits in banks are either knowingly or un unknowingly going to be holding those deposits in stable coins. The future of payment systems is about to change forever. What does our future look like when everything is faster, more decentralized, and easier to control? and we don't have to rely on centralized parties anymore to custody our savings and checkings and what happens when we can actually earn high yields on our checkings account on the blockchain. This is the future of finance and we'll be talking about this theme with Sujie Singh and Nikil Bardage, co-founders of Metalendent. Very interesting project that's working on exactly this issue. This is a sponsored interview, so do your own due diligence. This video is not investment advice. Welcome to the show, co-founders of Medeland. Glad to have you here. So, let's start with future adoption of stable coins. As you know, the Genius Act recently passed. It's a federal law that creates a comprehensive framework for how uh payment stable coins and digital assets uh would be accepted in the US. It's groundbreaking. It's very comprehensive. Let's talk about how this is going to disrupt global finance and the use of stable coins worldwide. How will our lives change? Yeah. Um I'll take that. It's very exciting times um when it comes to the emergence of uh stable coins and the clarity that we finally have um on stable coins and the usage of stable coins. And this is the perfect time for it to now segue into the masses. Right? There's a ton of primitives uh that live on the blockchain, financial primitives that stable coins enable uh think lending, think borrowing, think uh payment transferring and blockchain technology has been emerging and being developed for the last 5 to 10 years and not you know the day-to-day doesn't really feel it and haven't felt it but now they will because of the emergence of stable coins. So you have the on-ramps, you have the off-ramps, we'll get into that a little later. And you have interoperability, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of hard work that's been built over the last 5 to 10 years. And now regulatory clarity uh that'll bring in a lot of fiat into blockchain. And we'll get into all of the benefits. Uh at a high level, what we are expecting to see is honestly every bank in the US is going to launch their own stable coin. The simple reason why is that stable coins enable direct transfers instantaneously. So in a world previously today where you might have to wire somebody and wait a few days for the funds to arrive, stable coins allow that to happen in seconds if not less at no cost. Um and so at a high level, every bank is going to have to adopt this or they're going to get taken over by a neo bank. And what that means is within the next 5 or 10 years, everyone who holds deposits in banks are either knowingly or un unknowingly going to be holding those deposits in stable coins. Either they're going to hold it directly in crypto wallets or their bank will be holding it for them in stable coins. What What do you mean unknowingly? Can the bank take your deposits, put them on the blockchain without your consent? Uh to some degree they can, right? That depends how they're holding the deposits. If they want to be able to allow users to uh send money instantaneously and offer those features that the newer neo banks are offering, they can do that. And you know, unknowingly and consent, it it really comes down to like terms of service and accepting uh those sorts of things, which a lot of people obviously don't read terms of service. They just opt in. But this is the new financial infrastructure uh that Nikil was mentioning where stable coins are going to become the primary way that even banks hold their assets for users because they they're going to need to offer these services in order to keep their customer base. Okay. So, uh I'll switch back to Nick. So yes, this is a common uh theme I've heard amongst a lot of not just crypto adopters but even economists who point to the fact that banks face obsolescence if they don't either adopt uh blockchain payment rails like stable coins or improve their existing financial payment rails like Swift to make it as fast as uh stable coins transactions. However, here's a here's a here's a caveat here. I just went to Starbucks, right? I bought a coffee. I didn't pay with stable coins because my bank doesn't allow me to hold stable coins. It allows me to hold fiat. And so when I go to Starbucks and I use my phone, Apple pay to pay. It's through fiat. It's not through a blockchain. So until vendors start accepting blockchain, this is a technology that isn't really relevant to the regular person. It's just a B2B payment rail. How would you respond to that? Yeah. Uh the time is now. Uh we've partnered with MetaMask who has a a Mastercard debit card available. It's launching the US in a few weeks. It's available in Canada. Latam hundreds of millions of dollars are being processed to merchants. Any merchant that accepts Mastercard seamlessly takes stable coins on the other end of it. And the beauty here is there's $7 trillion at the moment sitting in US checkings accounts. Just US, not even just the world. $7 trillion sitting in checkings accounts earning 0% interest. As we all know, traditionally checking accounts, people don't think of them as interest bearing, but they should be. Blockchain enables that, and I'll walk through that flow. Um, people need to save some money in their day-to-day in checkings accounts. Not everything gets put into the market, CDs, money markets or stocks. You got to go buy the coffee as you mentioned. Now, till the point of purchase, that dollar should be making you interest. And that's where we come in with a high earned checkings account backed by stable coins and spendability, seamless spendability with the Mastercard and MetaMask. Um they the mer merchants don't even notice a difference. It's settled in the background to fiat. But the the user is holding stable coin and it's earning this morning up to 10% on that stable coin. Wait, so you're talking about Okay, so let's switch gears now. You're talking about Metalland. You're earning 10% yield on metallend. That's correct. Okay. So, let's look at let's back up before we talk about the yield. How does this work? Yeah. So, I can dive into that. I think to understand how the yield here is generated, it's important to understand what are called lending protocols on the blockchain. Very simply, it is essentially like margin uh margin loans. So, like you can take a loan out against your stocks. Lending protocols on the blockchain allow you to do that with crypto. So, let's say you have one Bitcoin uh and you want to take out some money to renovate your house. You can go to a lending protocol like A or Morpho and deposit your collateral into a smart contract and then take out a loan. The person that's providing you that loan are actually lenders. They put their money into a pool and a a borrower deposits their collateral and they take out a loan and it's an overcolateralized loan. So at most you can take 80% uh as a loan against the value of your bitcoin and then obviously the risk for the borrower is that if bitcoin's value comes down a the protocol automatically sells some of their bitcoin to pay back the loan to ensure that lenders are whole. So that's how yield works on the blockchain. Now, the problem is that there's a lot of these lending protocols like Ave. And if you're a person that just wants to earn interest on your dollars, you actually have to pick first a stable coin, which as we mentioned, there's increasingly more and more of them. Uh second, you have to pick a chain like Ethereum, Salana, um Base, etc. And then lastly, you have to pick a lending protocol like an A or Morpho. And so there's hundreds of options for people to decide where do they want to deposit their funds. And the other thing is the rates for each of these pools changes in real time. And so the way that metal end generates yield for users is we sit on top of all of these protocols. You deposit your funds on a metal end and we find the highest pool for you and we optimize and uh rotate that weekly to make sure that you're earning as much as possible. At a very high level, how would you explain metalend to a 10-year-old? I mean what you're just describing uh Sujie, it sounds like a bank. I mean, is it just a virtual bank? Um, in some ways it operates as a bank, but the difference is when you're using a bank, you actually don't know what's happening with your money and where it's going, right? There's fractional banking. Uh, they only need a whole 10% of your deposit in the bank. And then they're writing their own loans, you know, some could be mortgages, etc., and they're making their own risk assessments. Here, it's using open protocols on the blockchain. And within Metal, a user can actually go in and configure their own settings to say, "Hey, A is, you know, the biggest protocol. They're the ones that I've heard of the most. I only want my funds to sit there." So, imagine if you could go do that with your bank, right? You could go and say, "Uh, I want to earn, first of all, 10 times more than savings accounts are giving right now. But secondly, uh you can see exactly where your funds are going to earn you yield and change it if you feel uncomfortable uh with where that's going and what collateral is backing it. Okay. Uh Nick, anything to add to that before we move on? Yeah, just one piece to add is it's a global system now, right? One, the reason interest rates are so much higher when it comes to traditional US banks, Fedbacked uh rates plus or minus 1% generally in this case, it's pure supply and demand globally. I think it's really important to understand that there is demand to borrow. Hence, there's higher interest rates on the blockchain because global emerging markets don't have any option. They don't have the sophisticated banking systems in Latam and in in East Asia. But those users now you're seeing more and more convert their payrolls, their paychecks into stable coins, a to get out of the deflationary currency. We've been seeing that for years. But now once they're on chain, they have all of the financial primitives such as borrowed lending and now you have a global borrowing demand that the decentralized financial system aggregates and that's where we come in and have a layer and just again tie it fully back to that coffee you mentioned. Now you can go get a coffee with that USD anywhere where they take Mastercard. Right. I'm just going to address some probably viewer concerns at this point. Uh because this is a new project and we've seen uh the risks associated with new projects. We will get into the details of how this works to maybe swatch some viewer comments and concerns. However, the first parallel that maybe some people have already drawn, myself included, is this sounds a lot like some of the um instruments we've seen in 2021. Celsius ran something similar. It was later re revealed to be a Ponzi scheme and we know what happened to the company. It collapsed and it was sued for being a Ponzi scheme. Let me just share my screen here. Uh Celsius CEO Mashinsky, this is on um an article here dated 2021 on Block Works. Uh to be fair to the author at the time, nobody really knew exactly what was going on before the scheme was revealed and the company was sued. But anyway, the 8.8% yield we pay on stable coins is true value of USD. Nearly one million people have deposited a combined $20 billion into DeFi lending and saving pool pro uh protocol Celsius was with $1.2 billion being added every month. Um this also promises a payout on yield 8.88% as of this particular article but I knew at the time uh this the yield did vary depending on the time and the instrument that you invested in. uh on stable coins between 0.5 to 13% on other types of digital assets from Bitcoin. We know now that this was a Ponzi scheme. Most of this was paid by using other user deposits. This sounds a lot on the surface like what you guys are offering. How are you any different? Yeah, it's a great question. Very fair question. Uh one thing to actually correct in this uh article which I think has been referred to later is here they're referring to Celsius as a DeFi protocol. That's actually not true. Celsius was centralized uh and a centralized service and that's really important because what that means is when users put their funds into Celsius they had no idea where it was going right that's why it was able to be a Ponzi scheme it was a black box people deposited their funds and in the case of US dollars that were deposited they were then taking those funds and basically operating like a hedge fund they were investing in the crypto markets and giving the return back to users until obviously the market crashed and they lost to all the user deposits. In the case of the digital assets mentioned here, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the yield they offered on that. The interesting thing is they were actually using the lending protocols I just mentioned, a etc. to take out loans against user deposits and then speculating with that. So when the market crashed, it was actually these DeFi protocols, the real DeFi protocols like a that liquidated the actors like Celsius and forced them to take their losses and they were then unable to pay back uh depositors because obviously they were doing things that were very illegal in terms of speculating with user uh user funds and user deposits. Metal is entirely different. Uh when a user deposits on meand you see exactly where your funds go. You can deposit and withdraw at any time and you can update uh your configuration to make sure you're controlling where your funds are going. On top of that, it is entirely self-custodial. So everything is built with smart contracts. Nobody at Metal End or even the protocols where your funds add up in can touch your funds. It's tied one to one with your wallet with your private key. You're the only person that can deposit and withdraw. You're the only person that can update the configuration to determine where your funds go to earn you yield. And as I mentioned, you can see it at all times. Here's where my funds are now. They're in this pool. This pool is, for example, uh taking as collateral Coinbase wrap Bitcoin and driving yield. And if you want to withdraw, update your configuration, you can do that at any point in time. You said 10% yield, correct? Is what Metal is offering. Yeah. And to clarify, it's up to 10% yield and it's variable. So I think that's the biggest difference the just in that article right there where they guaranteed 8.8% as a fixed number is because they were they were hedge funding it right they were saying we'll get to 8.8%. When it comes to DeFi and Metallend, it is a variable rate based on supply and demand purely. It's so 10% is this morning. If borrowing goes down, right, if borrowing against USDC in this case in the stable coin goes down globally, that interest rate will drop. In the last year, we've seen it be anywhere between 6 1/2 to 11%. Um, and it's hovering right now between 9 to 10%. But it's purely variable um based on supply and demand of the protocols. Okay. Can you just explain one more time how the yield is generated and just step by step walk through the mechanism of this yield generation here? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So essentially the way that it works, let's say I'm somebody in um El Salvador. I have Bitcoin. I don't want to hold my local currency because I don't trust it and I need some funds to renovate my home. I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I don't want to pay taxes. So, what I can do, especially because I may not trust the banking system in my country, I can go to a website like a or Morpho and those websites allow me to connect my wallet, deposit my wrapped Bitcoin in this case. So, Coinbase has wrapped Bitcoin. There's other companies that also wrap Bitcoin to bring them into Ethereum and take a loan against it. For easy numbers, let's say my Bitcoin is worth 100K. I know right now it's about 110. um I can take up to 80% of that value. So if Bitcoin's at 100K, I can borrow up to $80,000 in stable coins and I'm paying interest on that, which as Nikquil mentioned is a variable interest. The risk there is that if I take my max borrow, which is that $80,000, and then Bitcoin drops even to 95, uh, A will automatically with their smart contracts sell a portion of my Bitcoin slightly below market rate to pay back my loan to get me back to 80%. Okay. So, you're paying an interest on the loan and then the yield is, I guess, owing to the lenders. Exactly. So, it's a two-sided marketplace. There's borrowers on one end who lock up their collateral and take out this overcolateralized loan. And there's lenders on the other end who are depositing stable coins and earning interest that's being paid by the borrower. And then Coinbase or A just makes money through the spread, I guess. Yes. Exactly. Through the spread. Coinbase and a make the money on the spread. So, exactly how a bank operates lending. Exactly. except this is uh smart contracts on the blockchain as opposed to people making decisions and determinations about hey this is trustworthy collateral etc. There's no humans involved in the loop here. It's all code. It's all reading financial data of what is the price of Bitcoin, what is the price of Ethereum, etc. when it comes to that asset and up on a blockby-block basis. Well, if if there is Okay, so Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Let's just take Coinbase as an example. So if Coinbase is is uh is the custodian of my crypto and they're lending it out and hence I'm if I'm borrowing and I'm being p I'm paying a yield and then if I'm also staking a protocol or in this case uh depositing stable coins I'm being paid a yield. Well, uh, the question I have is how do I know if, let's say, I want to withdraw everything. They're not going to experience, let's say, bankr run scenario where they don't have enough to pay out all the depositors. Yeah. Um, on on the Coinbase side, yes, it is an exchange, centralized exchange, but on the decentralized side, there are liquidators. Um, all of this is automatic. So if there's let's say a draw down right for the collateral and and people want to see back their loans and all the lenders want to get their funds back it's always overcolateralized so there's always enough in the pool for all of the lenders to retrieve their deposits and that's the beauty of it being overcolateralized and what maintains it to be overcolateralized is the third arm of this which is liquidations right there's an army of liquidators mostly running bots on on the blockchain As soon as someone gets close to their limits, they sell their collateral. And what's that's the beauty of you here. It's frag it's it's all fractionalized, right? So, you don't need to sell a full Bitcoin. You could sell as little as, you know, $100 of that Bitcoin where there's a liquidator waiting and it keeps you under the limits at all times. Okay, I see. Now, uh the next question I have is why do we need metalin? Like where does metal end fit into this picture? Why can't I directly just generate a yield through Coinbase or a for your examples? Yeah, you know, it's a great question and really one of the initial things that we're solving here is fragmentation. So, you think about um lending and where you want to deposit your funds. As I said, a user needs to make three big decisions. One is what stable coin are you going to hold? The second one is what chain are you going to move your funds to? And then thirdly, which protocol? We've talked about a there's many more. There's actually hundreds of different pools. Uh so a user could put USDC in a on the base chain or they could put a different stable coin like USDT on the Binance chain on Morpho, etc. There's so many different places and the problem is every single one of them has a variable moving rate. So it becomes very hard to optimize your money movement. And that's what Metal End does. We sit on top of hundreds of these pools and we route your money for you to maximize your earnings. On top of that, we let you see and control exactly where your money goes. So, if you, for example, don't feel comfortable with USDT because maybe they haven't passed uh your smell test or I know they're still working on getting compliant with the new Genius Act requirements. You can say that stable coin or I don't want my funds to go onto this chain or this protocol and we take your decisions. It's encoded on the blockchain with your private key and your money routes exactly where you want it to go. Are there auditing systems to proof how much are you know how much money or uh how many coins are in reserve? Yeah, that's the beauty of the blockchain. It's all visible. Um all reserves are onchain. You can see all of the on the ledger uh reserves, proof of reserves. Um there's third parties that validate proof of reserves. Uh those are emerging securities companies that also do that. And the one one more thing I'd like to add just as an analogy, you know, you asked why can't I just go directly to a protocol and earn yield. Yeah. The analogy there would be, you know, in the traditional finance world going to picking a treasury bill, right? Let's say like, hey, I'm going to pick treasury bill. that's giving this yield. Now you have a banking layer on top that makes that very seamless for you and that's where mealin comes in. There's also an aspect of making a seamless spending with it. But yeah. Okay. Uh users are concerned about security. There's been a number of hacking incidents in the last year. By bit saw the biggest hack in history in February with over a billion dollars worth of Ethereum stolen. Uh they did resolve the issue. A lot of it was returned. I'll switch over to my screen now. Uh, Melind did also experience a security incident. This is on the Melind Twitter page. We experienced a security incident on February 1st, 2025, incidentally coinciding close to or you know close to the bybit hack incident which resulted in the unauthorized withdrawal from our lending pool. I won't read the entire post, but what's next or highest priority right now is patching these vulnerabilities and making affected users whole. Uh I will note that many users did appreciate the team's efforts in addressing this issue right away. So what happened here? Let's just address what happened in this particular security incident and what Metal is doing overall to enhance security. I'll take that. Uh we used to before being an aggregator earn and spend uh account we used to have our own protocol similar to a compound um our own protocol. In transitioning away from that uh we did have a hack uh where we made every user whole. We patched we made it whole. We've sunset that protocol. It was during the moment of transitioning away from that. There was a missed uh security audit. We used third party security audits which is very common. There was a missed audit here that uh revealed a vulnerability during that audit. U but again our priority was to make every user whole which we did. We now uh don't run a protocol. We are a UX routing layer on top of protocols. We do take security extremely extremely uh we take we take really priority in security. Uh but again we don't have those risk that a and that's why it's so necessary to have the layer we have because protocols are focused on security. They're focused on liquidity. They're focused on bank runs. The questions you've asked. They're not focused on user experience and adopting the masses. The masses will not go directly to these protocols. They will go through UX layers such as ours or they'll go through wallets where we have partnerships with MetaMask wallet and Coinbase wallets. They're going to come in through those in those points because it's so much easier. Uh we still get audits done every month, multiple times a month, we get audits done, but again we don't custody any funds. We don't manage any liquidity. Uh that was a transitory period. And and David to answer your broader question in terms of like DeFi, right? Even Bybit as you mentioned had the biggest hack in history. Uh DeFi of course has had risks and it's unfortunate every now and again you hear about a hack and our plan for this is actually to diversify deposits right the the key issue here is a lot of users when you put your funds somewhere a lot of your eggs are in one basket right and what we're building actually is to diversify your deposits. So, a user can come in, deposit $100,000, and $1,000 will each get spread out across various different protocols. That means if something does happen, a black swan event like any of these hacks, only 1% of your funds are at risk. And because of that diversification, we can lower risk. And with lower risk, we're looking at actually being able to offer insurance for our user deposits as well. So, that's something that's in the works for us. We're really excited about it and we think that it's actually going to revolutionize uh DeFi and bring adoption from the masses for sure. And and just in terms of authorization and and uh access to your own accounts, something that the bipit hack revealed to the world is that even multi-IG authorization has failed and has been proven to fail in this particular instance. Uh how would you address this concern? Yeah. So one very common thing uh is for example in the case of a and a lot of these larger protocols is once they built the product then they actually get rid of the multi-IG and burn the keys and so what that means is uh you can't update that version of the product that that product those smart contracts are set in stone they can never change there's never even a multisig that was used in the initial um phase of development that can't be used anymore and so this is a very common practice. I don't think it was a practice. Unfortunately, at Bybit, I think that was maybe one of their treasury accounts. I'm not exactly sure, but when it comes to these smart contracts protocols on the blockchain, they actually remove the ability for even a multi-IG to update contracts. What's that means is that once it's fully audited and it's out there, there's no way to change it. It's it's out there and it's set in stone. Okay. So, diversifying deposits is one way to enhance DeFi security overall. Uh you also talked to me offline about tokenizing stocks as being collateral. What can you tell us about that process? Yeah, I'll take that. Um with the emergence of tokenizing stock, going back to how Suji was talking about the mechanics of collateral and borrowing and lending that creates the yield. The collateral that's going to be coming on chain will be a lot more stable, liquid, right? Think stocks, think you know real world assets that now can be used as collateral to borrow against in the past if there was a risk on for lenders that was the collateral wasn't strong enough potentially if they felt that it wasn't strong enough think maybe altcoins right that have a high volatility not enough liquidity would a lender be like hey I don't really want that collateral backing my interest now we got assets coming on from the real world that will be, you know, we're talking tons of liquidity, stable, can easier be used as price prediction and it's really going to enable stronger yields, stronger stable. Okay. Uh, anything to add, Sujief? Yeah, I mean, I just think that the other thing that we will see with this, obviously, there's people outside of the US that want to be able to buy Apple stock, want to be able to buy Tesla stock. Those people don't have access today and tokenized stocks are going to give them access. In fact, it's also going to give people in the US 24/7 access to stock trading, which is a big feature for Robin Hood and all exchanges want to replicate that. The way to get there is tokenizing stocks. But with the global adoption of uh US stocks and just global a global stock market, you're going to see a big increase in borrowing as well, right? Margin, etc. These protocols, a morpho, etc. They're very simple to use. they're on DeFi and with Metalend we're going to be able to make it very easy for everyone to access that and have their funds move to the highest yield place right now. Uh what is the future of payment systems in the next 5 to 10 years? Let's suppose um and I'm not saying it will or it won't but let's just suppose that your system takes mainstream adoption. Everyone will have some sort of DeFi checkings account that is high yield in nature. uh which is admittedly something that we don't really usually have in our banks, but let's suppose we have that. Um what will the world look like in this scenario? Yeah. Um we're bullish on the world looking like stable coins being at the center of transactions, whether that's transferring funds to your family member offshore or using that to purchase a coffee. Uh, stable coins are more efficient, they're quicker, they're cheaper, they're faster, and they provide you exposure to the globalized economy, which is the blockchain. And we feel at this and SG mentioned at the top of the call, more and more stable coins are coming for that exact reason because these institutions know putting a stable coin at the middle of all of their transactions is the way to get more adoption, therefore also more yield. Again, all of the financial primitives open up. Um, I'll go back to the the key data point I mentioned at the top of the call, which is $7 trillion. There's no reason that money shouldn't be earning all the way till the point of purchase. That we feel like should be a common table stakes use case. And we're talking months, not years for that to happen. Right. Okay. And and just taking a step back here. Um again for the layman watching this who who may be understanding what you're saying but also going back to my example today I purchased coffee with my credit card. The payment was instantaneous. Um I understand that stable coins are inherently faster than wire transfers. But why would an average person opt to use uh this particular system versus just using their credit card and swiping on a payment um uh platform? Yeah, I mean it it's very simple. Um you're right. your credit card work. But if you sign up with the MetaMask card and you take the money that's sitting in your checkings account, you move it to Metallend, you can earn, let's say it's $10,000, you can be earning 10% on that $10,000. And then you can go with your Mastercard backed MetaMask card and buy that same coffee. You're going to get 3% cash back on the coffee and you're going to get 10% on all the money in your checking account uh until the point of purchase. Okay. Well, great. uh I want to just take a few minutes to talk about your background and uh how uh your professional journey evolved uh to the point where you became co-founders of this project. Yeah, on my end uh I was at Amazon for 4 years prior to meand uh particularly the ring engineering team. I was the right hand to the CTO. We have a global team. We were, you know, I was responsible for hiring, product development, uh, the full software life cycle. And really the segue for me into uh, blockchain and DeFi was we had a huge set of users in Latin America, specifically Argentina uh, sorry, not users, engineers. We had a team of about 200 engineers for Amazon uh, and ring in Latin America. And what they would do immediately is when they received their payroll, they would convert it to stables or they would convert it to crypto. A to get away from deflationary risk on their local currency and B again to open up all of the financial primitives that are you know like the US has borrow lending and so forth, leverage earning against it. And then I went down the rabbit hole of the blockchain. I was fascinated. Uh a little bit of personal background between Sajiv and I. At that time it was co we were roommates on a whiteboard talking about blockchain and decentralized finance. Uh we ripped apart a and compound and all of their algorithms and we were fascinated by it. Started personally using DeFi as a lender to make some money. We were holding Bitcoin and Ethereum as you know just personal interest and yeah have immense personal trust with Saj. We've traveled the world together. Again, we built Medeland to start as roommates. He's married now, so we're not roommates, but um that's the story on how Metal started. Backed by Panta. Um thanks to that team, they've really been a strong advocate. Um as has a lot of our partners like MetaMask and a few others exciting exciting partners coming. Yeah. And on my end, uh as Nicole mentioned, also have a web 2 background. Uh started off at Zip Recruiter, the jobs company, ran marketplace products there. uh and then transitioned to Bird, the scooter company, where I also ran uh product and marketplace. Eventually ended up running growth at Bird and was in charge of basically making sure vehicles were in the right place at the right time to maximize rides and revenue for the business. And so while it's a very different type of product and business, it's actually very similar in terms of the supply demand issue moving uh in this case assets to places where they can earn the highest yield whenever there's supply and demand imbalance. Uh, on a personal note, I actually grew up in Mexico City. So, from age 3 to 18, I grew up in Mexico City. And my whole family for the longest time was earning uh in pesos. There are business owners down there, but they were always trying to think about how do we hold this everything that we're earning in uh an asset that can last for the long term. So, US dollars, gold, etc. I think Nicole and I are both really excited about the products that we're building, being able to impact the lives of everyone that we've talked about from his engineering team in Argentina to my whole family and everyone that I know in Mexico and make it easy for them to hold stable coins, earn high yield, and be able to spend on the day-to-day. Do you both have engineering backgrounds? Yeah, yes, we do. And when you say that you're backed by Panta, can you just disclose um you know the fundraising process, roughly how much was funded and any other notable partners that you may have? Yeah. Um Panta led our seed round. Uh we did a seed round at $5 million that they led. Uh Collab and Currency also co-led with that. Since then, Panta's also doubled down on us and has done another check. Um we'll be doing another fundraising within the next 6 months. Uh we're focused on really every day asking our team and you've asked a few times during this uh interview. Can our moms use this product? Can and we ask the team that every day. Um that's our northstar here is to enable our moms to be able to use this product and really benefit from the advantages of the blockchain. After we've nailed that experience, uh we're close. We'll be doing another fundraising round. Well, I appreciate the time, gentlemen. Thank you very much for uh educating us on stable coins and metallend and uh good luck to your venture. Appreciate it. And uh we'll talk again soon. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.