The MoneyPot Live: The Rise of Real-Time Global Settlement Networks

As digital commerce becomes increasingly global and always-on, traditional payment infrastructure is struggling to keep pace. A new generation of programmable settlement networks is emerging to enable real-time value transfer across borders, assets, and platforms. 

In this episode, Richard Astle explores how modern payment networks are reshaping the movement of money by enabling faster settlement, reducing counterparty risk, and unlocking new financial experiences. From stablecoins to embedded wallets and programmable payment rails, we unpack why the next phase of global payments will be defined by interoperable networks rather than isolated financial systems.

Guest: Richard Astle, Vice President, Head of Network at Fireblocks

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Welcome to the Money Pot Podcast, recorded live from the show floor here at Money2020 Asia 2026. I'm Oliver Smith, head of content for Money 2020 Europe. And today we're diving into one of the most transformative shifts happening in global payments infrastructure today. For decades, moving money across borders has been has meant navigating a maze of correspondent banks, waiting days for settlement and accepting opacity as the cost of doing business. But that model is being fundamentally challenged by a new generation of programmable, always-on settlement networks. Joining me today is Richard Assel, Vice President and Head of Network at Fireblocks, the infrastructure platform that has secured $10 trillion in digital asset transfers last year and processes more than $200 billion in stablecoin transactions monthly. With 18 years in financial services and deep expertise in building institutional grade infrastructure, Richard has been at the forefront of this transformation, helping major banks, payment providers, and remittance companies to reimagine how value moves globally. Richard, welcome to Moneypot. Thank you very much for having me here. Thank you. And I've heard this is your first Money 2020 show as well here in Asia. How are you finding it?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

It's been great so far. Uh arrived yesterday, so uh it's only a short trip, but uh it's nice to spend uh sort of a lot of dedicated time across uh real payment use cases, payment industry. Um, we've seen a big shift in our client demographic and also use cases that Fireblocks and within the Fireblocks network. Um so it's really important for that commitment to be shown in in person as well and making sure that we are serving the payment community uh in terms of how well or in relation to how well we serve the trading community over the past seven years or so.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Oh, well, we hope you enjoy exploring the show floor. Um, so Richard, let's start. I want to start by setting the stage and I guess the big picture. Traditional payments infrastructure was built really for a different era. Business hours, batch processing, correspondent banking relationships. What is fundamentally broken about that model in 2026 and why are we seeing this really urgent push towards networked, real-time settlement today?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

The baseline of all of this is that we've had the internet, you know, for the past 30, 30 years or so. Money hasn't quite caught up to the speed of the internet. So it was almost inevitable if you're going to have this open internet that you need to be able to have money that moves at that same speed. The correspondent banking infrastructure just doesn't quite support that. You know, it's based on very much a series of bilateral relationships. And if my bank doesn't have a correspondent banking relationship where I want to send money cross-border, you know, that introduces a lot of friction. So it's often you'll see, you know, four, five, six hops, and it's just messages bouncing back and forth between different banks, and that delays, you know, the settlement of a payment significantly. Um, it's also quite a liquidity trap, you know, because of the sort of the nostro vostro relationships between the different uh correspondents. Um, and we've talked about this, and a lot of people have talked about it here at the event, you know, of how much liquidity is actually trapped in in the system from that from that relationship. We're now in a you know in a position where we do have money that can move at the speed of the internet with through the form of stable coins. So this sort of outdated infrastructure will go through a refresh, and it's not a uh an either-or. We're looking at more of a a new rail for settlement that's going to be faster and more in in real time.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Interesting. So not about replacing what's there, but more about augmenting and adding new functionality into the mix. Um, you've talked about moving from bilateral relationships to this more networked infrastructure. Can you paint us a picture, I guess, of what does that actually mean in practice? How does that networked model change the way that a bank or a payment provider thinks about moving money compared with their traditional correspondent banking relationships? So delve into that in a bit more detail.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

So you're essentially opening up more of the market through almost like a single point of access. What we did from a Fireblocks network standpoint when we launched the company Fireblocks back in 2019, you know, we saw we sought out to solve sort of like two things. One, having a secure wallet, which is, you know, the foundation of anything, being able to hold and protect an asset in its stationary format. Uh, but then we needed to have a network in order to transfer assets securely at scale. So our original client base were based very much around uh what we would say is like institutional trading. It was sort of speculative trading, market making of cryptocurrencies. And the problem they were having is that every time I establish a new relationship with a new client with either a new client or a new exchange, I have to interact with a blockchain address. So what we tried to do for to from a network standpoint is open that up where they didn't have to interact with blockchain addresses anymore. It was just another endpoint. So having different uh providers of uh like exchange services, your Coinbases, your Krakens, Bitstamps, Binancers of the world, having those natively available through Fireblocks. The other piece was important is that we would be a neutral party in this. So I think we're probably one of the only networks you can say out there, which is truly neutral. We never sit in the flow of funds of clients, uh, we're never taking custody of client money. So that also allows to serve, you know, sort of the market as an infrastructure because we're because we're neutral. So rather than these sort of basis of bilateral relationships, they can onboard with Fireblocks, establish their Fireblocks workspace, which is where they sort of manage all their assets regardless of where they are. Uh, and then through that, they have instant connectivity to 50 plus crypto exchanges. When it comes to the payment side of that, you know, that took some time to move out of this sort of speculative side and into what we're seeing now as more utility-focused use cases, which first being payments. Uh, and we're giving them the same experience. So one in one access point through Fireblocks, giving them sort of an open market to various payment providers uh sitting in different jurisdictions. So essentially if I need to on-ramp or off-ramp, you know, we can support that through, you know, global countries and currencies uh through through that single access point. It doesn't necessarily change the onboarding side, that still remains. But at least from like a connectivity standpoint, it's not reliant on an A to B, it's a A to N essentially.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

Yeah. And they don't have to deal with those 50 providers, all of those different networks, they can just deal with Fireblocks, and that really simplifies the interaction for them. Super interesting. Um, I said earlier, Fireblocks you know, processed over $5.9 trillion in digital asset transactions last year and was recently named a market leader in stablecoin infrastructure by FCX Intelligence. Walk us through what the Fireblocks network actually does. How does it enable institutions to do that sort of seamless, easy connection and transact in ways they haven't before?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Tell us about some of those use cases. So I guess expanding a little bit what I was talking about before, the net, you know, the fire blocks network actsing as a single connectivity point to global network, essentially. Uh, and there are other networks which are part of the Fireblocks network, Circle Payment Network, for example, will be part of the Fireblock network very, very soon. Uh so it's that one-to-many network of networks uh approach. Um and uh from a like from a payment standpoint, the reason being again, neutral party, super important, uh, but also having the connectivity to providers that our customers want to use. Because, you know, we don't need to sort of dictate how or who uh a customer uses or what rail they they choose to send send money on. Um so we looked at that, you know, as a as a network, say, okay, who do we need in there as a baseline, and then who are our customers asking for? So making sure they've got the instant connectivity to um you know an on-and-off-ramp provider like maybe DLocal in in Latin America, and from that single access point, essentially they can do the on and off ramping. And we've seen it across like the the data in particular, um, where these were most prominently used and who was using them as well. So like off obviously, like the the long time, like the ones where you've got a big time zone between. So if you're looking like Latin America to uh Asia, Asia Pacific region, you know, that is a very common corridor for us to see flows. And we see them of different sizes. You mentioned like the the the five trillion or so assets that were moved last year. So last 90 days, stablecoin volume sat at about $350 billion, which is very impressive. But I think what's more impressive of that was is that that was spread across 22 million transactions. So I think that is a significant usage. It's not just sort of big volume. Uh and the the the interesting thing about those flows is yes, we see the smaller payments, which are essentially remittances coming from those corridors, Latin America, Southeast Asia, but we also see it on the wholesale side as well. So where are these on and off front providers sourcing their liquidity from?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Because we've, you know, again, as a topic of this of this forum, actually, uh, is you know, essentially what happens when you start to step up? What is when you have to do 10 million, 50, 100, you know, any amount. You know, that's when some of these sort of restrictions uh can can be come in from a liquidity standpoint. And that's actually where those institutional trading firms are now stepping in. So even their client demographics have changed. They're not just, you know, supplying Bitcoin liquidity to exchangers, they're actually now supplying essentially foreign exchange in and out of stable coins to those on and off run providers who do sort of like the last mile uh payout. So we have to think a little bit about how, not just like who needs to be in there, but making sure that they can actually power the use cases that will run a real business at scale. So although we've got a great network, we've got a great wallet, you know, we're a cybersecurity for company at heart. And that's the other challenge that you face when you are uh dealing in a digital asset, essentially a bearer instrument, is that you've always got that deposit address. You mess that up, or bad actors or hacks, things like that. They they do have they do happen and can happen, as we've seen. Um, but enable that to happen at scale, you need to have a sort of a heart of a cybersecurity, of cybersecurity. And that's also where we've differentiated ourselves at the core through external audits and testing, but also that we can demonstrate our scalability. 22 million transactions, that's just payments.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Amazing, amazing. Uh, thank you for unpacking that that big number that I said and giving us a bit more detail on the you know the size of those transactions and as they grow as those larger organizations and institutions are starting to rely on that network. Um one of the, I guess, most compelling aspects of real-time settlement is how it transforms risk. Because traditional cross-border payments can take days to settle, um, creating significant counterparty exposure. How does how does 24-7 settlement change things from a risk and liquidity equation for for those larger institutions that we were talking about?

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, so we covered a little bit about the the retail aspect of uh stable coins. I think that's also a bit of a um, it gets a little bit confusing sometimes in these discussions. Is that are we talking about an end-user product or are we talking about like an infrastructure layer? And that can vary depending on who we're talking to and also which geography people are in. So we have, you know, what we do see is less and less off-ramping in the retail space. And that's because if I'm sending US dollar stablecoin into Africa or our clients are more off, moreover, um, chances are they're not off-ramping anymore because access to US dollars in certain regions is very difficult. And also if you're exposed to a volatile currency. We go back to the the sort of the cross-border banking side, you know, uh side of uh of the world as uh as well. A lot of these banks have actually exiting these countries as well. So getting how your hands on dollars is actually quite difficult.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

What often doesn't get talked about is actually what's happening at the wholesale level and what's happening at the big corporate financial corporates. And you know, they have less burden from a regulatory standpoint. If I'm, you know, doing if I'm a commodities trading company, for example, I'm not necessarily inherently licensed because I don't need to own a bank or anything like that. So they can actually adopt stable coins a lot easier. And they look at it from a risk perspective in the context of if I'm sending money to emerging or frontier bank uh banking regions, that might take a few days, money gets stuck. Um, that's very costly for me, particularly if I'm shipping hard goods. Um so they look at it and say, well, what's the risk of five days plus in emerging and frontier banking systems where money often sort of just disappears and reappears later on?

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Or could I take stablecoin and do a stable coin sandwich and maybe take a few hours of intraday risk with USDC or USDT? And that was like a real eye-opener for them. Uh, and what drove that is not just their own treasury purposes and the frictions they have with managing multiple bank accounts in different jurisdictions, but it was also coming from their end customers and their suppliers. They were also saying, hey, can we pay or be paid in stable coins? So they were actually getting the demand side of this as well. So I think it really, you know, starts to build that full lifecycle of why using stable coins and why they're actually being actively adopted. And of course, if you're actually adopting and you're not off-ramping anymore, that also raises the question, okay, what about treasury management? How do I earn yield on those as well? So we've even now starting to see this sort of like um uh incoming use of money market funds to generate yield on assets which are held that could future, you know, fuel the future on-chain uh securities world. We're super excited. I don't know when that's gonna happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

See that chain kind of come together. Um, so so I mean, it's clear from what you're saying that stablecoins have very much moved from crypto curiosity into serious payment infrastructure and remarkably quickly. Um, you've seen companies among the clients that you work with, like MoneyGram, World Remit, and major banks go live with stablecoin settlement in 2025. What's what's driving adoption? I mean, I know we've touched on some of the points already, but how how are institutions actually using stable coin in those in those treasury and payment operations in that and in the a bit more detail?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

So I can give an example actually. We're just touching on more of the the commodity use cases. We'll go into the wholesale. I know whether the world world pays are more retail, but I I personally love the wholesale sector because big payments in large size, but also it it fuels a lot of other activity like the programmability of money. And often when you're in that sort of shipping commodities energy sector, you're actually often waiting for some goods to arrive. Yeah. And that also traps you know a lot of liquidity. And of course, the banks want to hold that because they make money on your money when they hold it. Um, so we the commodity client that maybe is probably worth discussing uh is one based out of the Middle East. They're actually a gold trading firm. Uh, and this was the the one that was sort of asking their suppliers were asking to be paid, and customers wanted to pay in stable coins. So they did, of course, some validation with amongst some of their clients, and they, you know, they estimated that about $250 million a month would be made using stable coins. So that was enough for them to, you know, experiment, we'll say. Yeah. The first month they did about 1.2 billion. Once they informed their clients that they were stablecoin enabled, yeah, um, you know, at really sort of ramped up quite quickly. Um, so I think part of it is just understanding the size of the market is it's a lot bigger than what people, you know, what people actually think. Um, and the and the desire for you know, whoever you work with to also use stable coins. Um, but I think it's also you know important as well that it the enablement side. So I think there's that that's probably if you go to like the banking sector as well. I think that the first point they need to be thinking is like, how can I enable and accept stable coins? And there was a great piece a few weeks ago, I think Tony at Ubix uh came out with and he said, Why don't you just treat them like checks?

unknown 15:58

Right?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

I don't know how the relationship with your bank. I give you a check, or I used to give you a check. Uh, you go to the bank and say this is a a good receipt of uh that you're gonna be paid. Yeah. And stable coins in a way are actually very simple. The you know, the the receipt paid is that there's a US Treasury backing this USDC. So I think that's the the acceptance side is is is is important. Uh and then once you can, you once you can and accept stable coins, the demand you'll be quite overwhelmed of.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

Yeah. It feels like, as you're talking, it feels like there's you know network effects here where as more players come on board and the advantages are clear, it it's sort of leading to that that that trickle outwards. Um let's talk a little bit about programmability because programmable money uh and programmable payments is a big talking topic at the moment. When payments become programmable and can trigger automated actions off the back of that, what can what can new financial models be unlocked and what use cases does that lead to? Can you give us some, I guess, concrete examples of what becomes possible that wasn't before with programmable payments?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

So I think maybe shipping would be a good topic to kind of discuss again, it again to the commodities sector. So sorry to sound a bit like a broken record, but you know, it's an area uh that is, you know, just ripe with fraud, but it's also very paper-based. And again, we're moving at trying to move at the speed of the internet. All right. So um, you know, often if I'm, you know, a seller of of goods, I have to go to the port with the goods. They give me a bill of lading, the legal document entitled to those things. Then I go to my bank, hand it to my bank, or mail it. The bank hold that paper document, they call the importer's bank, say, yep, got the documents. You can now hold hold the money. Now let's wait a few weeks, ships to arrive, you get to port, and then they can sort of go to the port, get the bill of lading. Yep, got it. Now you can release the money. So it's just really, really archaic when you think of what we have. So, you know, the the programmability you can have around that, of course, is you do need digitalization of like the the actual documents themselves. And the carriers are starting to do this uh as well because they see, of course, the benefits to it.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

But the because you can now attach that document to the means of payment because both are on-chain, you know, that will allow you to sort of program as soon as that goods hits the dock, the payments received, and you can then actually retrieve your goods. It's a much more transparent system uh in terms of doing it. Obviously, it mitigates a lot of uh a lot of fraud, uh fraudulent actors. Um, but it does require uh some collaborations across the industry. Um, and I think just to maybe just go off on a slight tangent, then I think that's one of the big barriers that we have. Excuse me, uh, one of the big barriers we have generally as an industry. We are such a tech-focused industry, and you have this kind of like Silicon Valley-like approach to um a lot of it, I want to eat the world kind of thing. And what or say that crypto native mindset uh is not quite maybe not realized fully yet, is that when you look at how the banks work, you have they have figured out how to create a standard, how to have standardization across their industry. It could be more efficient, but for what it's worth, it is very efficient still. So I think the the bit that we need to be doing as a more of an industry in forums here and and elsewhere is agreeing to what a standard is, and that requires competitors to work together. Um, because otherwise the banks will come in and catch up very quickly because they figured that out a long time ago. Swift, car networks, isda. Um, you know, they're they're almost endless. So I think that's that's the the other point as well. And when when you look at programmability of money, that will require a lot of collaboration.

unknown 19:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Interesting. And thank you for the example with the shipping industry. I think it's fascinating some of these sectors. We forget just how, I don't want to say behind, but how much work still needs to be done to enable them to use the tech and tools that maybe some of us take for granted. Um, really, really interesting. Um, let's talk a little bit about interoperability because you touched on standards just then. The payments landscape is increasingly multi-chain, multi-currency, multi-rail. How do you solve for interoperability when you have institutions that need to move value across Ethereum, Solana, um, traditional banking rails and everything in between, without requiring them to become blockchain experts, without them requiring to read the book on it, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Um, so one thing we do is abstract a lot of that complexity away, particularly the security aspect. And that's what we focus on. We invest uh in the region of 40 to 50 million dollars every year, just improving our existing security posture. So I think, you know, doing it yourself is not um not don't do everything yourself, but look after what's core to you. Uh and I think that's uh a message we give to some of the companies that are thinking about adopting stable coins, accepting them. You know, the tools are available, the same tools that, you know, the big custodian banks have are available to you as a corporate entity. So I think the getting into the market itself is actually quite easy in a sense, a lot easier than what people think. And the tools that you know the pros have uh are also available to you as well. And for those industries that do face a lot of friction, it could be you know payments being stuck, banks not understanding the risk model or not having the risk appetite to deal with some of these industry. You know, we say to I say to them, I say, look, well, nobody knows your business better than you.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So why would you not want to control more of that? So that's sort of like starting from the basis of like why do it and why do it yourself. Uh, and then you of course need a wallet. This is the you know the starting point of everything, a secure wallet that is multi-chain. Um, because if you're sending money from one geography to another, it might be on a different, it might be a different asset that's been received. So Latam, you might see more adoption of USDC. Yeah. If they're sending a dollar payment, because it is just a dollar payment, if they're sending that to uh the Asia Pacific region, that client might want to receive tether. Same, same, more or less. So that that is also the the need for this sort of multi-chain world. Um and then I think the second part about, you know, an add on to that, which is very much in focus this year, the more like the hot topic is like the privacy angle is how do you actually embred a privacy into that? But you know, within the within the right um ethics, ethical way. Yeah. You know, a few years ago they're like, what privacy? No way. Don't down with privacy until you say, okay, I'm going to pay us your salary in a stablecoin. And then does your colleague, you know, do you want your colleague to know how much you got paid or how much you have in your bank? No. So that's also like another add-on, I think, which is really important to the interoperability side. Yeah. But fundamentally, you've got to start with a wallet.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Fantastic. Thank you. Okay, my last, my last question. Look now, looking ahead, what would you say are the remaining barriers, whether those are technical, regulatory, or operational, that are needed to be addressed for real-time, these, you know, everything we've spoken about, these real-time global settlement networks, to become not just an option to book, but to become the default for for over the next 20, 12 to 24 months. If we if we want them to become the new standard, what needs to happen? What needs to change?

SPEAKER_01 23:16

So we've covered standard. Another piece that's probably really important privacy of course, standardization. The third, the third, the third bit that I would say is also is is having um like an open sort of network and protocol around uh addresses. You know, because we've got an enormous address book so to speak. Yeah. You know, we know every wallet that's been issued from a Fireblocks uh software. It's over 500 million wallets. We don't know who it belongs to, but we know the source. You need to be able to expand that across a market to create a sort of a a standard around managing the uh the the address side. And that of course lends itself into on-chain identity. Because having every time you have an off-chain process to relay something on-chain, that's going to add friction. It's going to add latency. That's not to say we solve to solve KYC and KYB and all of that. Like that I think is, you know, people been trying to solve that for decades. But certainly having you know sort of mitigating a reference to off-chain data when you're trying to transact on chain is is like a big barrier to actually scaling. So obviously we're as again leveraging our unique position as a as that neutral entity within the market infrastructure.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

You know, that's something we're very focused on, but we can't focus on that and uh help it be adopted by the market in a silo. So again it forza getting the industry to work collaborative collaboratively in the same wax we'll we'll compete against you and like like why as we expect that but used to be we still need to come together to form that that sort of standard. But the on-chain off-chain is still still up for the debate. Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

Well a lot of work to do in 12 to 24 months to to make that happen. It is we'll see. Richard firstly thank you so much for for being on Moneypot and uh for making the journey to Money2020 Asia and sharing your insights with us. And to our listeners thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode make sure to subscribe to Moneypot wherever you get your podcasts. You can join the conversation on social media using hashtag moneypot. And if you're building the future of finance we'd love to see you at Money2020 events around the world where technology meets humanity and where conversations that matter are happening. Until next time keep innovating keep collaborating and keep building trust thank you