Supply Chain Unlocked
Supply Chain Unlocked delivers actionable intelligence for suppliers to Walmart and other retailers. Hosted by Dr. Matthew Waller—renowned supply chain expert, author, and trusted advisor—the show decodes the strategies, technology, and leadership required to win on the world’s biggest retail stage. Each episode blends Dr. Waller’s expertise with insights from industry leaders, innovators, and former retail executives, giving listeners clear and practical strategies to navigate compliance, harness technology, and build stronger partnerships. More than just commentary, the show provides the intelligence and actionable guidance suppliers need to stay ahead in today’s fast-changing supply chain.
Supply Chain Unlocked
Ep. 2 - Stablecoin Meets Omnichannel
Money should move as fast as your cart. We sit down with Garrett Harper, Head of Business Development at Squads Labs, to unpack how Stablecoin is quietly becoming the payment rail that matches modern retail speed: instant refunds, cheaper settlements, and programmable rewards that actually feel valuable. If “buy online, pick up in store” reset fulfillment, Stablecoin is poised to reset how cash flows through every step of the retail value chain.
We start with a clear breakdown of what Stablecoin is, why most are backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries, and where the real product–market fit already exists: access to dollars and cross-border payments. From there, we connect the dots to omnichannel operations. Imagine payouts that land in seconds, loyalty that accrues in real time, and fewer intermediaries taxing every transaction. That’s not a crypto pitch—it’s an upgrade to user experience and unit economics. We explore how retailers like Walmart can harness yield to fund better rewards and lower fees, all while keeping the Stablecoin plumbing behind the scenes so shoppers never have to think about “using crypto.”
Then we look ahead to agentic and ambient commerce. AI agents will reorder staples, handle price checks, and even settle micro-purchases across platforms. Videos, streams, and everyday contexts become shoppable surfaces with automatic, transparent revenue splits. Smart contracts make that trust-by-design, enabling if-then money that legacy rails can’t match. We also dig into how processors and networks respond—why companies like Stripe are experimenting with Stablecoin settlements to cut costs and speed payouts—and how transparency on public chains can strengthen trust for marketplaces, long-tail sellers, and nonprofits.
If you care about omnichannel strategy, payments efficiency, and what happens when AI meets checkout, this conversation maps the road ahead. Subscribe, share with a colleague who owns payments or loyalty, and leave a review with the one Stablecoin use case you want most next.
I want to clarify that this podcast is distinct from my responsibilities as a professor in the CMM Walton College of Business. Nonetheless, it aligns with my aspiration to provide practical insights to professionals and business by showcasing companies and people that can enhance your ability to manage, lead, and strategize and market effectively and the retail value chain. And now without further ado, let's get into the exciting episode. I have with me today Garrett Harper, who is head of partnerships with Squads. We'll be talking about omnichannel, but we're going to start off by talking about crypto and particularly stable coins. And many people don't really think of crypto when they think of omnichannel. But when we look ahead, crypto's going to have, especially stable coins, will have a huge impact on omnichannel. So this is a topic that needs to be uh understood by those dealing with omnichannel. So uh so Garrett, uh welcome to the show. Good to have you here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, thanks for having me on. No, this is a blast. I'm excited to talk about the Sablecoin space. I've been in it loosely, at least, since 2018, roughly, and then I've been directly in the space since about 2020. So I've got at least a few opinions on everything.
SPEAKER_00:You do. Uh and uh I I know I've been following you for some time, and I know you're when I think of experts in crypto, you are the first one that comes to mind. So, Garrett, would you mind sharing with us a little bit about what are stable coins?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So let's start really simple, and then we'll build off that somewhat. So stable coins are a tokenized dollar. So when you've heard of token, you probably think of crypto in general, and you think of something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is very volatile, right? All of the tokens in crypto are. Stable coins are called stable, uh stable coins because they're supposed to actually track the value of something, and that something is usually the US dollar. So every stable coin that you have is interchangeable for a dollar. So how this works at like a very high level is you have$100 in a bank account, and then some company then prints, I say prints, it's digital, 100 stable coins on top of that. So all 100 stable coins are backed by$100, right? And so that's why it's interchangeable one-to-one. It's always backed. Now, what happens is reality is it's not actually backed by$100. It's usually backed by like 99% US treasuries. The reason to do that, and it's short-term US treasuries, is that you can earn interest on those treasuries, right? So there's a few reasons that stable coins have taken off. Um, one reason is just that people want to access dollars. Okay. So whether you're in South America and you have a very volatile currency, or really a lot of countries around the world, they just want to access the US dollar. It's the strongest and it's the most reliable. That's kind of use case one, access to the dollar. The second use case is cross-border payments. That's the other product market fit today. So in this conversation, you know, we'll talk a lot about how stable coins could be used even by companies like Walmart and others. That has a place that doesn't have product market fit yet. What does is access to dollars and then cross-border payments. Why? Because when you make a cross-border payment, it takes days, it's very hard to track, and it's very expensive. Stable coins, you can do so in less than a second. It's actually the first time you see it, Matt. It's one of the coolest things that will get you into crypto or stable coins. I could send you$100 right now. You could be in Dubai, you could be anywhere. And within less than a second, you'll see it appear. Like it's it's honestly, it sounds lame, but it's pretty magical to watch that. Like that doesn't happen anywhere else. And it's real money that you can then exchange for a dollar at any time. To exchange for a dollar, right now, you have to go through someone like Coinbase or Exchange. They're the ones that'll actually interchange that for you. Um, so that's use case number two. The third use case is companies see it as a way to one, provide better experiences to their users, two, make more money. So if you can do both of those, it's a pretty good deal, right? If I can make more money and provide better experiences to my users, I'm probably sold. So, how does that actually play out in practice? Well, it's better for users because if you have payments involved at all in your company, which almost every company does, it's a faster, cheaper way to do so. So your customers might be see savings. They will also get paid out quicker because it's instant. There's no more like, hey, we'll pay you, we'll send out your refund in 24 hours, you're paid out in less than a second, right? Which that may not sound like today, no one is used to that. So do people really care? Like I get paid out on a second versus a day. Over time, as companies adopt stable coins, it will become the standard. And if you don't do that, you're gonna say, why would I use that company more? Right. So it's gonna naturally create this competition to say, like, similar to Robinhood, Robinhood didn't on why did Robinhood blow up? They did trades without any fees, right? And now if you use any brokerage firm, no one charges fees. Same thing will happen in stable coins, in my opinion. It's not because users care that stable coins are being used, they don't, but it's just because it's faster, cheaper payments, similar to Amazon delivering in two days. Um, companies can make money here, besides just offering a better user experience, because like I said, these stable coins are backed by US Treasuries. So there's this whole competition going on right now. Um, like today, it's been going on for the last year, where every company in the crypto space, even companies like Stripe, companies like Ramp, are looking to potentially launch their own stablecoin. Now, like why would they do that? It's because if you're Ramp, if you're Stripe, you have a lot of customers with balances just sitting there, right? That balance is probably not earning you really any money. Just like if you have money in your bank account, you're making less than like 0.05%. Stable coins, you all of a sudden can make that treasure yield of like 4%. That is a massive amount of money because the stablecoin space right now has a market cap of 310 billion roughly. Um, if you go back to 2021, it was only 30 billion. So it's already grown 10 times over the four-year period. Um, and our belief, especially for people in the ecosystem, believe that will be, you know, that's going to go another 10 times within like two years. Um, and the reason for that is not because users care, it's because businesses can earn more money and they can offer better experiences to their users. So that's kind of the three use cases of stablecoins. It's access to the dollar. Um, it's better, cheaper, faster finance, which and also revenue for customers, and it's a way to do cross-border payments. Um, as we'll talk to you know later in this conversation, I think it's also the perfect currency for the internet and the perfect currency for agentic commerce. So that's how I think it plays a role in not just commerce, but the world at-wide and why it could basically power the next era finance.
SPEAKER_00:Uh thank you for that excellent explanation of stable coins. Um I think as people were listening to this, especially those that are familiar with omnichannel, they were probably starting to see the connection uh to omni-channel. But I would like to get into that. Uh before I do, um I would like to say something a little bit about Walmart, because Walmart has really been the innovator in OmniChannel. Um there's a lot of companies out there that are, you know, e-commerce-based, but they don't have a footprint of stores. And um and there's there's uh a lot of companies that have footprints, but they don't have much in the way of e-commerce. Walmart's a little unusual in that what regard in the United States. Um but if you think about it, Walmart started in June of 1962. June of 1962. And they went public uh in 1970. And uh in about 1973, they adopted a strategy called Everyday Low Price. Uh a guy named Jack Shoemaker, um, who worked for uh Sam Walton was the guy that came up with this idea and really pushed it. And really, no other U.S. retailer has been able to emulate it. It's it's it's like so many strategies that uh are successful. They're very subtle, uh kind of like why would that be a big deal? But when you know the industry and you know the the incentives to use high-low promotional types of uh methods, you realize, oh, it's very difficult. Because it's also going to be paired with something called everyday low cost, where you try to make things as efficient as possible. And I'm giving you this background just because you can imagine how this plays into it with uh stable coins a little bit. Anyway, uh Walmart's EDLP strategy and EDL C strategy has been extremely important to them. And um other companies like Sears and many other a few big grocers you would know have tried to implement it over time and never succeeded. Um but uh but in um when when Sam Walton received the uh presidential medal of honor from um President uh Bush, um he um he said during that um interview announcement, he said Walmart is about helping people save money and live better. It was about 1989. That became Walmart's mantra, their their tagline, if you will. And um and but of course Walmart also started they started out with just general merchandise, then they had super centers, uh clubs, Sam's Club, um, you know, neighborhood markets were which are more like grocery stores and some other formats that they've experimented with. But then they started doing something called buy online pickup at store, and they really put a lot into it, and it paid off when COVID hit because they were really the only retailer in the US that could do it efficiently at scale by that point. And so they took a lot of market share um because of that. But but buy online pickup at store is truly an example of omnichannel, you know. Um really it's just letting customers shop however they want to shop. You know, um you can buy online pick up a store, you can buy online deliver to home, buy online, deliver and home, buy online drone delivery, right? There's all kinds of combinations. What's that?
SPEAKER_01:That one's cool. I've seen that at my house in Arkansas, actually. Yes, it's very, very cool. Throws you off the first time you see it, but you can see all that with the future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I've uh used it before. Um it's it's amazing. Uh but but at any rate, um you know Doug McMillan, the current CEO of Walmart, um rewrote the purpose a bit. Yeah, the so that it's not just save money and live better, but a little bit broader. Um he the the purpose he wind uh wound up uh writing was Walmart is a people-led, tech-powered, omnichannel retailer dedicated to helping people save money and live better. You can imagine why I think stable coins is so relevant here, right? It's people-led, but it's tech powered. So the tech powered part is important. Omni channel, retailer, allow people to shop however they want, that's an important aspect. And then help dedicated to helping people save money. There's another N-Road for uh stable coin and live better. I mean, if you can avoid scams, you're living better. So I I wanted to point that purpose statement out and the context behind it, just so you see why when I first heard you talking about stable coins, this came to my mind as being very relevant to OmniChannel. Um I'll let you react to that before I ask any other questions. What what are your thoughts about that?
SPEAKER_01:It's funny. I was wondering when we were making the connection between what you're talking about here with Walmart and then where stable coins are and how those two tie together. But after hearing you talk about this and their mission more or less, I think it makes complete sense. Um the big reason I see that is because, you know, it at the end of the day, people want outcomes. They don't care about the tech. They don't care how it happens, right? Like they want things that are cheaper, they want things that are faster, and they want more selection. Um, that's basically it, right? They don't really care how it happens unless something goes wrong. That is the only time people care what is behind the scenes. Um, the whole goal of stable coins is to make the tech side better without changing, necessarily having to change user behavior. They just see a better outcome. So we're not trying to convince people to use stable coins because it's some cool tech. We're trying to use the get people and developers to use stable coins because it can save their users time and money, right? And you can make new financial primitives that you can never make in the past. Um with Walmart, I can see this and just commerce in general. I there's a lot of ways that these come together. Um, one fun use case we'll save, I think, is like the more that commerce becomes automated and agentic, I think stable coins are basically money built for that system. Um, similar to when you had the internet, credit cards had been around for a while. I think the first drop, it was like in uh 1950s. There's like Bank of America, I'm pretty sure, when they just like dropped his credit card to all these people uh randomly. It was like the first big credit card, and there was a ton of fraud, but it got credit cards out into the system. They didn't really become popular though until the internet. Like, can you imagine the internet without credit cards? Like buying anything on the internet. Like, how would you do that, right? At first, it was a whole even security issue when you first had that. Like, would you really share your information on the internet? People got past that. And then encryption became a thing. Funny thing is, encryption is like the whole technology behind stable coins, they're highly related. It's all about like privacy and encrypted and um provenance, like pointing where things came from. But you can't imagine the internet without credit cards. I can see a future. This is obviously projecting. Um, stablecoins can be the same case for agentech commerce. So you could say, how could we have agentec commerce 10 years from now? I mean, just yesterday we saw OpenAI come out with this like browser extension. And you can do things like, hey, every Tuesday, I want you to purchase XYZ from Walmart, for example, because maybe it's a recurring thing. I know I want to cook for the week. Um, that agent is acting on your behalf. They need maybe they're even spending money on your behalf. But that is really, really cool, but also creates this whole new risk, right? Like if you're gonna give an agent access to your bank account, do you feel comfortable? And also, can that agent even interact with your bank account? Is the money like native to that agent? Like, can they access it? Can they use it? Um, you know, these agents are acting autonomously and it's all through computation and everything's like basically on a real-time basis. The traditional financial system is not real time. If anything, it's been designed not to be real time. Everything wants to be really slow. Um, so this is where I could see stable coins coming into this. And I think on that agentic side is really cool because everything you're talking about with Walmart here, even if you don't think it's agents involved, but like think about recurring purchases through Walmart. Whether you're having that delivered to your house, whether you're picking it up, all of that really can be controlled by an agent at some point. And that's where I think where stable coins can become a really big thing. Even without that, I think it's cool because you can save people money in many, many ways. Maybe if you're at Walmart, you can earn interest on your balance. Like there's more incentives. Like Walmart wants to have a direct relationship with their customer, and they want those people to either visit the store more, to visit their site more, um, and have a reason to keep coming back. It's almost like you could create an advanced loyalty program with stable coins in some way, whether that's through rewards, whether that's through cheaper payments. Um, so there's a lot of opportunity there. And I I know I kind of like went off in a couple directions, but I think that's a really important confluence of where uh this overlaps.
SPEAKER_00:You um have mentioned to me the concept of ambient commerce. Yeah. Would you mind explaining that? Yeah. Ambient? Like when I think of ambient, I think of room temperature. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, you know, I should look at the actual definition of ambient. How I think about it, at least, is like essentially it's your surrounding. So ambient music. It's like you walk into a space and you're just surrounded by music. Um, yeah, so shopping in current commerce has always had dedicated spaces. So used to that meant you walked into a store, right? That's when you bought something. That's probably the only time you bought something. Uh, then you had websites. So you actually went to websites to go and buy something. Um, that was a dedicated space. And then you had checkouts, and then you have things like Instagram now, right? Where you have ads and you can actually make purchases through those ads directly. So these are all dedicated spaces. And over time, technology has advanced those spaces and made them more contextual. So, you know, when you're on Instagram, you're not maybe trying to buy jeans, but like just two days ago, I bought jeans on Instagram because it served me an ad and it made it really easy to purchase, right? Um, ambient commerce is the concept that over time, using both just like traditional technology, but also LLMs, AI's dynamic, dynamic UIs. So um, it's gonna make everything where it's monetizable. And I think a really good example of this is when you're watching YouTube or uh an Instagram video. Every pixel on YouTube could be monetizable in the sense that like you're watching a video, maybe there's an influencer on it, maybe there's not, and they have a t-shirt. They um we're doing a podcast and they have headphones on. All of those can be recognized by an AI agent. And when it decides the right time for you to potentially make a purchase, they can add an affiliate link. It can pop up, you can click on it and say, I love those headphones that Matt Waller is wearing right now. I want to buy them. And immediately you get paid some of that as like an affiliate fee. YouTube gets paid some of that as an affiliate fee. So basically, at all times, everything becomes monetizable, which I think for some people sounds terrible. It's like a transaction economy. Um, I think it'd be really cool. Like for the first time, you can be even walking down the street. You don't even need AR glasses. Like, forget that. I think that's gonna be really cool in the future where you can like interact with things around you. But you could just use your uh your iPhone. Say you're walking down the street and you see some sign of something and you're like, that's actually a really great shirt, or that is, you know, I want those shoes. You could take a picture of it immediately because of AI. You can actually recognize what that is, find it on the internet, create a link for you to buy it, and it's instant checkout. So you're moving from this, you know, lately. I think it's been really big with direct-to-commerce or direct to um direct to consumer is something that a lot of businesses have been trying to do. And that means just sell, you know, from your website directly to some consumer. This is where it's like direct to context. No matter where you are, everything becomes monetizable in a transaction opportunity. And that's what I mean by ambient commerce. It might sound a little far-fetched, but I really don't think it is at all. And if you've been paying attention to AI over the last even year and how quickly things change, um, you can see where every single shirt, if you wanted this Wilson t-shirt, this would be monetizable right now. And then you could do automatic payouts that would go through, if you post this on YouTube, some would go to YouTube, some might go to you, Matt, and then some might go to me. And uh, that's a pretty cool feature. And and being able to distribute funds like that is something that stable coins are perfect for. So that's yeah, the where those um have conflicts as well.
SPEAKER_00:So in the future, when we have ambient commerce, attention's gonna be very important in business.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast this morning. It got me really interested in this. It's like ever uh it's probably overdone, but everyone talks about it. It is the attention economy in so many ways, right? Like everyone is competing for attention. I like to use YouTube as an example just because uh big YouTube fan. They're the most streamed app now on any TV. So TV now, 50% of watch time on a TV is a streaming app. I believe no longer traditional TV. And then YouTube is the most watched streaming app. And now more than 50% of YouTube is watched on um on a TV. It's not even, you know, you think of YouTube, you think of being on your computer. That's not the case anymore. 50% of the views are on TV. Um, so everything is an attention economy. When you're chatting with ChatGPT, you're not on Instagram, right? Like maybe you don't think those two are competing, but they are because it's all about your time. Um, and what's interesting is because right now, the majority of these apps are monetizing through ads. Well, what do ads need? Ads need attention, right? Um, I and I think it's really interesting to see where companies are going to go forward because uh when I when I was listening to this podcast this morning that I mentioned, it was talking about Facebook. So Facebook used to be all about connection, right? Like you're connecting with everyone on your campus, and everyone on your feed is someone you know or indirectly know. Then they started basically Facebook and Instagram started getting killed by TikTok. And why? It's because TikTok was all about attention. They didn't say we don't care about your network, we just care about serving you the best content, no matter who makes it, right? So they went from like we only show you what other people you know made to what anybody made. We just show you the best content. Eventually, things like Instagram have said, okay, we're gonna drop this whole like we only show you show you things from your friends, we're gonna show you the best content because it's all about attention, right? That content that they show to you, it can be created by someone like me and you. And in the future, I mean, you've seen this with Sora probably recently, which is from um OpenAI. It can be created by AI itself. Um, so that's something that YouTube can have, that's something Instagram can have, that's something that LLMs can have. And all of that content becomes monetizable because we talked about this AM8 Converse thing. Everything they show you becomes monetizable. And so, yeah, it's always about attention, and it's gonna continue to be so.
SPEAKER_00:So one of the big challenges in business in general has always been trust. And, you know, especially when you're dealing with long tail suppliers, if you will, you know, really niche kinds of products. And so one of the benefits of buying through, you know, say Walmart Marketplace is you get their trust uh there a little bit. But I would think even for retailers, uh the trust you could have associated with stable coins and dealing with certain suppliers might be beneficial as well. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, uh we talked about this a little bit beforehand. I think trust is becoming more and more important. There's there's you've probably heard of like the barbell effect and almost everything, you kind of have like two ends of the spectrum. I think it's gonna become more and more important to be a company like Walmart, like Amazon, like YouTube, who it is, that you are a brand with trust. People trust you. If I buy through Walmart, if I buy through Amazon, I trust that if I don't get the right thing, they're gonna send me the right thing later or they're gonna refund me. I don't even have to think twice about it. That's why like seeing checkout by Walmart, seeing it by Shop Pay, seeing it by these different companies is huge. Now, where does that leave everybody else? Um, because I don't know about you, but you probably get calls all day. I get texts, um, and it's all spam, right? And it's only gonna get worse because of AI. Like, I don't even want to imagine, like, you know, used to my grandpa would get calls. Um, they try to, you know, basically come after you and get you to buy some item and it's all a fraud. Well, that's just gonna get worse. You're gonna have voices that sound real now. It's like it's gonna be so easy. I don't trust any text message I get now that has a link. Like, even at my company, we're told never click on a link, right? Whereas used to, if you were a company, like the first thing you did was like, let's get their email. That's how you get a direct relationship with your customer. Then it's like, well, if you can get their phone number, that's even better. Then you're really close to that customer. We've gotten to the point where that actually doesn't work anymore, in my opinion, because you can't trust anything that you get that's a text message. I will not click a link that says Amazon or Walmart on it. Because I just have to think that it's probably something that's trying to steal, you know, information, my credit card details, et cetera. Um, so trust is massive. So I think Walmart, for example, has a huge amount of trust, which is going to be an even bigger advantage going in the future with this whole like AI and the you know fraudulent behavior that's happening. But then that is where stable coins and smart contracts come into play. Because that whole thing is you're essentially establishing trust in a way that doesn't require a centralized institution. So I can, for example, Matt, I can send you 100 USDC, which is a stablecoin right now, and you can look in multiple places to see that you that you receive that. If I send you a bank transfer, it just leaves my account. I don't know where it is, I don't know if you ever receive it. There's no way for me to see that, right? Stablecoins completely change that. In some ways, it's bad because there's a privacy issue that people are trying to work on. Stablecoins are not private. That's probably one good thing to highlight. They're very open. You can see every transaction. Like Matt, if I give you my wallet address, you can see everything I ever did. Um, that also means in some ways you can use that transparency to create trust. Um, maybe an example of this is what is the government doing with funds that they raise? Or say you're dealing with a charity and they raise money from you and they say that they're using it for this purpose. Are they? Like, how how do you know? Stablecoins for the first time actually provide and enable that transparency to see where that money is going. So I think that's important itself. You can also do the smart contracts, that's a whole nother thing where you can create like these different types of transactions without needing a centralized party like Walmart. Um, but those are the two barbells. I think like Amazon and Walmart are gonna do really, really well. And then everyone in the middle is gonna struggle. And then that's why I think more and more people that are on that long tail are gonna adopt things like stable coins and smart contracts because it's the only way to establish trust and scale. Um so yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So that that's interesting. Um so basically, stable coins are using a public blockchain.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And um and so you get visibility. Um and so I could see your point about nonprofits, that's a really good one.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's massive, in my opinion. Like the whole whether you like Doge or not, like going into the government and seeing where money's going, this would make it a thousand times easier. Which for some things, like if you're doing military spending, you don't want to see where that's going. Maybe you don't want to share that with different nations. But there is some spending that that's actually a feature it's not about to have transparency. And there are people working in the stable coin space that are trying to enable privacy, so that will be an option. But by default, stable coins are transparent, and I think it's perfect for something like that, like a charity.
SPEAKER_00:So, Garrett, as an omni-channel shopper, why would I want to buy things using stable coins with a retailer?
SPEAKER_01:Uh the fun answer to that is you wouldn't. And the reason I say that is that I don't think that a buyer or a user should know that they're using stable coins. Only someone like me who's in the stablecoin space should know or care. But if Walmart, they integrate stable coins in their products, you shouldn't know. The only thing that you should know is that if Walmart needs to pay you out for any reason, whether it's a refund, or maybe you know, you're you have a Walmart card and you're putting funds on it, you don't have to wait a day to see those funds appear on your card. It's instant, right? Maybe Walmart has Walmart has so much functionality that I don't even know about that they probably offer some banking services, I bet, um, that are directly tied to this. So if you're making a payment, you want that to be basically free. If I send out a dollar, you want that person to receive a dollar, right? Stablecoins can help enable that. Um, Walmart, for example, might bring in stable coins because it's cheaper to do any payments that they have to do, whether it's to their employees, whether it's to users like you, whether it's to the vendors. And then on top of that, that's cheaper. And then you also have this whole interest component that we talked about earlier. Um, for the first time, they can earn 4% because it's backed by US Treasuries. Walmart can keep all of that, or they can have a rewards program, someone like you, Matt, and they can pay you some of that in the form of rewards. Maybe those rewards then, you know, we talked about stable coins are programmable. Maybe they can only be spent on certain things, right? So let's just say they pay you some type of reward. You can't just spend that at any other store. Maybe they even say, like, this is for, you know, we're going to the fall season, you can buy X, Y, Z products with these rewards. You can do that with stable coins. You can say it can only be used for this um reason or occasion. So the answer is really, I think that's one thing maybe people get wrong about stable coins, is when you think about money today, you don't think about how it moves. You don't think about like, you don't think about ACH, you don't think about wire. The only time you do, it's unfortunate because you're going to your banking website and you're hitting like do an ACH and it's not a fun process. Like in general, people should not think about this. This is just, it's just a technology layer that makes moving money faster, cheaper, and it gives you more and better global financial services. And that's why you as a user should should not care. But what you will get is the benefit of faster payments. Maybe you'll get higher rewards and lower transaction fees.
SPEAKER_00:So, so basically, the shopper really doesn't need to know that a company is using stable coins.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I don't I don't think they should know at all. And, you know, a lot of companies will have their own stable coin. So it'll be like Walmart USD. But I do not think that you, Matt, or anyone else that's buying a Walmart needs to know that. They don't need to know that a stable coin is behind your rewards program or whatever it might be. That is purely for Walmart doing because it's highly efficient, it's cheaper, they can earn more, and they can share some of those earnings with someone like you, and they can create like greater customer loyalty. So again, this is like a whole technology thing where it truly is about the outcomes, it's not about the tech. It's interesting to talk about the tech because that's why we have people in the industry who are like nerds and we love like building the next era of what we call fintech, right? Like, how can we make this better? But like, no one that has a credit card is asking how that works, right? That should be the same thing with stable coins. You should not care. You should just know that using a credit card means that you can go online and buy something in like an instant. That's really cool, right? Same thing should happen. It is just the next iteration of that.
SPEAKER_00:So it it reminds me of it's like if I order something from Walmart, I don't care if it comes from the store or a fulfillment center, right? And I shouldn't even have visibility to that. No.
SPEAKER_01:I just want the product is that it gets there and say like less than 24 hours or within two days, right? That's what you care about. And once you have that standard, delivery in 24 hours, delivery in two days, everyone then has to live up to that standard, right? Like if if you're not delivering, if you're now taking a week to deliver, you're gonna fall behind. People aren't gonna buy from you. That will be why stable coins get adopted by businesses, because as people integrate this technology and they're able to speed up payments, maybe Walmart won't be the first use case. The best thing stable coins are for are for cross-border payments. That is the best thing because cross-border payments are terrible. I used to live in Australia, I moved to the US. When my money going from Australia to the US disappeared for five days, right? Disappeared for five days, it had a massive like FX fee, and on top of that, it was$15 to send a payment. I could have done that in stable coins in less than a second.
SPEAKER_00:Like so, if companies are doing business across borders, that might be the first place they adopt it. 100%.
SPEAKER_01:100%. Or if they're doing business across borders, well, this is really related, or they have multiple entities across borders, because there are companies that have entities all over the world, right? And they have to move money around those entities. Instead of using traditional wire, you use stable coins, it's going to be a lot cheaper.
SPEAKER_00:And so I guess that would make it easier to recognize profits where you want to recognize them. 100%.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. And like a lot of merchants are enabling receiving stable coins today. So if you look at Shopify, for example, they allow their merchants to accept stable coins from buyers. Today, though, that means you have people out there like me that actually want to spend stable coins. We just talked about how I don't think that's going to be the normal person. They don't want to, you know, they don't care that's stable coins. That merchant doesn't actually receive stable coins. Shopify behind the scenes is converting those stable coins into dollars. Um, because right now everyone just wants dollars, right? Like everyone wants cash in their bank account. I think over time, people won't care. They'll just see it as a balance. It's just a dollar balance. And there will be more reasons to keep it in stable coins because if you keep it in that layer, like we talked about, it's scaling layers. All your payments are cheaper. You can earn more. It's just a better place to have your money. Just right now, what's happening is somebody is like, they have cash, they're turning it into a stable coin. So they have$100. Now you have 100 stable coins. They're like sending that somewhere, and then that person is converting it back to cash. So for every like traditional financial movement you have, you only have one on-chain because people are like, what do I do with my stable coins? Right. Over time, I think there's gonna be more and more to do with it, just like how I don't know if Walmart enables this yet, but like with Shopify, you can spin it at merchants. Now we have a visa debit card where you can spin your stable coins anywhere. Like, I don't have a reason now to move back to cash. The more that you have a reason to stay up here because there's more you can do with your stable coins, it's just gonna keep there and you have more cost savings and everything becomes faster and cheaper. And that's where things really take off. Right now, you don't see all the benefits because there's not enough going on up here on the stablecoin layer. Everyone's just like, as soon as I receive stable coins, I'm gonna turn it into cash. But once you get to the point where it's up here because everyone accepts stable coins, whether they know it or not, that's when the like industry will really take off.
SPEAKER_00:What are credit cards doing with this credit card companies?
SPEAKER_01:They're definitely exploring this a lot. Um, they all are doing, I mean, they'll do some stable coin settlement in the sense that you know you have all these payments happening throughout the day. Um, I'm not like the the master understanding this, but you have all these movements. And then I think like at the end of the day, they'll settle up, right? So it's not like money's actually moving every second you do a credit card. Um I think there's two ways to look at this. One, they'll see it as a faster way to settle between counterparties. Because, like I said, like a traditional ACH could take up to you know two to three days. They can now settle within seconds. Um, some stable coin networks would see this as uh potentially a threat. So you have somebody like Stripe who's getting more and more into the stablecoin space. Why is that? Well, what is Stripe's main expense? It's like credit card fees, right? So for them, it's like, how do we get around that fee, if possible, right? A lot of people are using Stripe by now. So if two businesses are using Stripe, for example, and they're paying each other, why should you have to have any intermediary besides Stripe? Because you're going from one Stripe customer to another one, right? So, like, why pay an extra 1.5%? I think Stripe sees this as an opportunity, and that's why they've made some major purchases in the stablecoin space to use stable coins to go from this merchant to this other one, and it never has to pay credit card fees. So in that way, they would be trying to get rid of that largest cost that they have by using stable coins. And that's why they're I I don't know if they're convinced that will happen, but they see it as a call option to say this future could exist. We're gonna try to make it happen because that is our highest cost right now.
SPEAKER_00:So with ambient commerce and you're talking about friction being removed from transactions, um, essentially, but you're also increasing the number of and kinds of transactions that can occur, and uh you're also uh allowing transactions to occur that wouldn't have because of a lack of trust. So all these things mean that the total number of uh trades, if you will, between uh buyers and sellers of all different types are going to happen more quickly and more rapidly and more efficiently. And uh, you know, one thing that's very clear is that the more trading that's going on, the more wealth that's generated for everybody. You know, there's lots of proof of this. Um so so you would think it's interesting to think about how many things right now from a technology perspective are increasing wealth. I mean, stable coins is an example of something that's gonna enable more wealth creation in the world. Um robotics, AI.
SPEAKER_01:It it's and Matt, just to jump in, think about I mean, this is I hate going there because I sound like that guy with the tinfoil hat, but that's as you have more AI and you do have agentich commerce, a lot of commerce will happen between AI themselves. So think about drop shipping with a huge thing that took off over the last like 10 years, essentially like you manufacture something in China and you arbitrage it and you sell in the US. You can imagine that happening without any human involved, right? So if you can have agents that are way better than we are at examining all the different arbitrages and prices and shipping and so forth, like you know, they're on the internet um and they have currency now, they could create these businesses, right? Whether that's a human that maybe is then like giving them access to funds, et cetera, that's always like guiding them. You can imagine a future where 90% plus of transactions are not done by humans. I mean, that's already the case with like trading, right? With algorithmic trading. You can imagine that apping in commerce too. Like a lot of these products could be done through agents. And sure you probably have a human involved in some way, but once you get to that point, these agents need a way to control money, they need a way to pay each other, and they need to operate between guardrails because you cannot, for example, fund some agent and just hope it does not spend all your money in some way, right? So that's why smart contracts, that's why stable coins, like I said, that can do if then that you can do that with uh agents, which you cannot do before with traditional finance. So if you believe in that future, if you believe in a future that's gonna be more global, believe in a future that more commerce is gonna be done through agents, whether that's just like me and you ordering online, we say make this recurring purchase every you know week, or it's actual agents like interacting with each other, doing arbitrage or whatever it might be. In that future, stable coins make complete sense. If you think the word world is gonna become more local and agents will not become a larger part of part of commerce, then stable coins probably don't matter much to you unless you want access to dollars. That will always be a product market fit. People around the world want access to dollars. Um, people in the US don't really resonate with that that well because we don't have that, right? People in the US have access to good banking. Um, people around the world do not. A lot of people do not, right? And that's where there's been a product market fit for that for stable coins for a long time. But in the future, if you want to go even you know further beyond that, like I think that's a pretty worthy cause in itself, right? Like it's easy to overlook, but that is a good worthy cause. But if you want to believe in this agentec high-tech future that is global by default, um, stable coins they perfectly fit. It's really hard to deny it and to not look at it and to see the adoption.
SPEAKER_00:So this is uh so interesting, but this is a really clear example of how this is going to impact omni-channel commerce. Uh but also it's a clear explanation of why we're gonna see the dollar, the value of the dollar is gonna increase if this really spreads like you're talking about.
SPEAKER_01:It's definitely a possibility. I'm no economist, so I don't want to make any bets there. But it it is true right now about so stable coins, I often say dollars. Stable coins does not mean it has to be dollars. It could be a peso, it could be the euro. But 99% of stable coins right now of that$305 billion are dollars. Um, I think over time, local currencies will become a bigger thing. Uh, that needs to happen for this whole world to take off because sometimes you do need to do exchange between like dollars and euros, right? Like we already support that with our products, but the liquidity on the Euro side is very low. So if you're moving big volumes, the like slippage that you're doing is not is not good. So right now, dollars dominate the space. And that's why, again, I think the government's a fan because they're saying, like, look, we're actually having more new net buyers for the dollar. And not only for the dollar, but the treasuries underlying that. And what's the biggest problem for the government right now? They're borrowing costs. And how do you get that down? You have more buyers for treasuries.
SPEAKER_00:But you could have two companies in Bangladesh trading, you know, again, not worrying about cash and using um stable coins and USD. They could do that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so if you're in a country where monetary policy is um not very disciplined, which is a lot of countries. Right.
SPEAKER_01:That could be a reason to do it. Yeah. I mean, you're already seeing this. Yeah, I mean, big okay. So a little bit of a tangent, but people don't always take crypto seriously, which I understand. It's a crazy world, but Bitcoin is over a$2 trillion asset. If you're not paying, if you're in finance and you're not paying attention to a$2 trillion asset, you're probably missing something, right? Like that doesn't make sense. Like maybe you should go back to school to be harsh. I'm kidding. But obviously, so like tokenization has taken off. We have 305 billion of stable coins here, and it's just like the early innings. Um, it is something to pay attention to. I'm not gonna like make this bet that everything moves to stable coins, but like I said, I do think if the world is going more global, if agentic commerce and business becomes more of a thing, stable coins are the perfect fit. It's like credit cards for the internet. There's not a there's not a better fit, at least that we have right now.
SPEAKER_00:I heard Kathy Wood of uh Arc Invest. Have you heard of that? Um she recently was um being interviewed from someone, I can't remember who it was, and she said if you use traditional portfolio theory, you would probably want to hold about 20% of your wealth in uh Bitcoin based on the variables that she was considering. She doesn't recommend that necessarily, but uh I found that shocking. I hadn't really thought of that before.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a big number. I mean, I I hold uh um, I don't know Bitcoin specifically, but like 80% of my net worth is in tokens of some sort, whether that's Bitcoin or something else. So I am uh a little bit biased and uh believer, uh, to say the least. Um I generally, I mean, this is not investment advice. I generally tell my friends like, look, if you're new to this, it's great to have like a 5% exposure in your portfolio. Um, I just think you don't want to put money in it that you're not willing to lose. Um, but I also just think that it is one of the most interesting uh investment use cases that anyone in the world right now has access to. If you have an internet connection, you can buy Bitcoin. I mean, it's pretty crazy. It is something that the entire world has access to. That's a lot of demand. I mean, US stocks, that the reason why stocks are going on-chain, if you're a company, you want people to have access to your stocks, right? You want them to buy your stocks. Once you tokenize them, this is the coolest thing about crypto, in my opinion. Uh, going on a little bit of a tangent here. Anything that you build, like some type of application, and you put that on the say Solana blockchain, the Ethereum blockchain, there's different, like you can often think of it as like an operating system. Once you build that app, everyone in the world immediately gets access to it. Immediately, right? So it's not like, hey, I'm gonna post this online and like it'll take it, and like only I can do it, only friends, only people in the US get access to it. Everyone in the world. That means if there's some company in the US that all of a sudden puts some stocks on chain, every single person in the world gets access to that. Now, there are things that you can do. So they could say, like, hey, only addresses that have been approved by us can actually trade this token. So there are ways to put in regulation because people are like, well, this sounds like it's not complied at all. You can do that. But the cool thing is by default, everything that you build is accessible to everyone. And that's why like the pace of innovation is kind of speedrunning what we call like traditional finance. Because for the first time, you've like opened up this financial system where anyone can build. Um, and once it's built, anyone can access it. And that that's a really cool part.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Garrett, this has been so interesting. It's amazing how crypto and um bitcoin and um stablecoins are going to affect, are already affecting global supply chains. There's no question about it. But I really do appreciate you sharing your knowledge and wisdom uh with us, not only explaining what stable coins are, but how they're going to affect the supply chain and omnichannel in particular. Uh this has been very eye-opening. Uh, so I really appreciate your time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, thanks for having me on, Matt. This is a blast. I mean, lots of do it again in the future. You know, maybe in five years, once we see this this play out, you know, we can revisit the situation. But uh yeah, this is a great time. Thanks for having me on.