Inside Reap's Stablecoin-Powered Card Infrastructure

In this episode of Mint Condition, host Maya Caddle sits down with Harris Leow, Head of Product at Reap, to explore how stablecoins are reshaping corporate cards, treasury management, and the future of global payments.

As one of the leading builders of stablecoin-native card infrastructure, Reap is rethinking how businesses fund spending by using stablecoins as collateral instead of relying on traditional banking models. Harris explains how the company is enabling programmable corporate cards, preparing for agentic AI payments, and helping businesses optimize treasury management with tokenized assets—all while leveraging existing global card networks.

From stablecoin-backed credit and AI-powered commerce to Reap's acquisition by Kraken and the evolution of payment infrastructure, this conversation offers an inside look at how the next generation of financial systems is being built.

Connect with our Host & Guest:

Maya Caddle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maya-caddle/

Harris Leow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrisleow/

About Mint Condition:

Join host Maya Caddle on Mint Condition as she explores what is actually happening as crypto and traditional finance increasingly intersect. Through conversations with operators, builders, and experts across payments and financial services, she looks at how crypto is influencing the next phase of financial infrastructure.

Transcript

Meet Reap

Maya Caddle 0:03

Welcome to Mint Condition, where we go beyond the headlines to truly understand how payments companies and financial institutions are actually leveraging crypto. Today's episode is about Reap, a stablecoin native card issuer built in Hong Kong in 2018. If that sounds like a modest start, the figures definitely aren't. Firstly, they have direct visa principal membership in three separate jurisdictions. Secondly, they've built a stablecoin collateralized credit facility running underneath a Visa bin instead of a debit rail. And most recently, they received a definitive agreement to be acquired by Kraken's parent company, Payward. My guest today is Harris, head of product at Reap. Harris started his career at MasterCard before moving on to Visa and had significant experience building crypto-native solutions globally. Just before he joined Reap, most notably, he was building international products at Coinbase. This conversation with Harris gets into the actual mechanics behind the headline. How a collateral engine turns stable coins into spending power without ever touching the payment rails itself? Why interchange economics change when a card is postpaid and collateralized rather than prepaid? And why Reap built for Asia's regulatory fragmentation before most Western issuers had a stablecoin strategy at all? We also spend real time on something that doesn't usually get discussed enough. What it actually takes, technically, to let an AI agent hold a corporate card spending power without ever letting it hold the card number. And where the infrastructure genuinely stands today versus where the announcements make it sounds like it stands. Now, on to the interview with Harris.

The AI Payments Problem Nobody Talks About

Harris Leow 2:03

That's uh that's definitely the hot topic of the day, Agentic. Um thought you never laughed. Um so so that this is yeah, this is a great point, Ryan. And with agentic payments, the core problem we're solving is that AI agents they can't hold a card number. The moment a PAN lives inside an LLM's uh context window, you you you've got a PCI ESS uh nightmare. Um and agents can't complete 3DS challenges, right? Because if you're doing it via an app or an SMS, how can the agent see it? So transactions just get declined at checkout. So what we have built or what we are building towards at Reap is a flow where human does the one setup step where they sign a spending policy with a biometric pass key, something like to simplify it, this rule or policy would be this agent can spend up to $500 a month at software mergers. Right? That creates what we call a scope token where the agent then uses instead of a real card number. Now, that agent in this scenario never gets to see the card details. And because the authentication already happened at the setup point when the human setup the policy, then the checkout challenge gets suppressed, right? And the agent just transacts. And what we have done here is essentially pull the level or rather the trust ceiling much closer to the card holder. Um reap, to your point, is one of the very, very small number of issuers globally that has built the infrastructure to support this model. Um we're in the final stages of going um live and we're building towards that direction. The pipeline is is real, the demand has come to us faster, much faster than we have expected. This is not a fed. We are seeing it in the market.

Maya Caddle 4:17

And one of the interesting things about agentic payments, right, is now there's a slightly different way to think also about compliance and risk modeling. Um part of that is let's say you may be giving your and your agent or an agent the ability to spend using a Reap card. But one of the interesting things I'm or one of the things I'm curious to understand how you manage is how do you manage rescinding that access right? Um, so for example, maybe an agent could be compromised or could hallucinate on spending decisions or act outside of intent. So what is the enforcement mechanism if an agent presents a valid credential for a transaction that violates the actual business intent? Um, but it's technically within the scope parameters.

Harris Leow 5:08

100%. I think those are very important questions. They're questions that we ask ourselves as we build towards uh this product. Um and as we, I guess at Reap, we're building, we're in the midst of building this product. And so those questions you ask are essentially the same questions that we have. Um we're gonna solve them. And once we launch, you'll be sure, I'll be sure to give you the alpha beta access to it so that you can be our early launch user.

Maya Caddle 5:38

Let's go. I I want to do that. I'm ready. Um, I will be messaging you, Harris, if I if I'm not. Um, and everyone else on listening to this podcast heard it, so you definitely have to follow. Two problems are getting solved here, and it helps to hear them separately. The first is about where car data actually lives. Once a car number sits inside an AI model's memory, that's a genuine problem for PCI compliance. You can't control what a model retains, and you can't guarantee it gets deleted. So the safest fix is the simplest one. Never give the agent the real car number at all. What Harris calls a scope token is a stand-in credential. My own personal read on this, and this isn't what Harris said or what Reap had said outright either, is that it works a bit like the network tokens on Apple Pay and Google Pay, which are already in use. The agent gets a token, the real number stays locked away with Reap. The second problem is about authentication, and it's really a channel problem. A normal 3D secure check pushes a prompt to your phone and waits. An agent doesn't have a phone to receive that on. So REIT moves the authentication earlier to the moment the human sets up the spending policy using a passport. That one moment is what every later transaction gets checked against. Instead of triggering a fresh challenge each time. It's worth knowing this kind of infrastructure is already live in the market. Reap sits on Visa's own list of approved partners for agent-based payments across Asia Pacific. I wanted to actually go uh back one step, right? Um, to it's talking a bit about agentiate payments and card-based payments. Um, I'm curious, when you're building a product for agenti payments, what are some of the obviously there's a way in which you're building, right? Or you built your card networking system for stablecoin native or crypto native payments. What are some of the different assumptions or models that you have to work with when it comes to agenti-based payments? I'm curious as to how even thinking about a card-based product looks different in that world.

Building Agentic Payment Infrastructure

Harris Leow 8:00

That's a great question. And I and I think one of the I wouldn't say challenge, but unique aspects of building agentic payments is that you essentially have to work with multiple partners and stakeholders within the ecosystem who have a different interpretation of payment protocols or rather agentic payment protocols. And so I think the challenge or the opportunity really for the next innovation within agentic payments is how we can find a way to build a unified layer that makes agentic payments a single interface, or rather, provide a single interface for clients and businesses to essentially integrate agentic payment capabilities into their products. I think that's going to be key in order to ensure that agentic payments um goes mainstream.

Maya Caddle 9:05

As part of that, I imagine, right, for example, when you're when a platform normally launches a car program, so outside of the agency payment space, right, um there'll be certain controls that will sit with them, certain controls that will sit with you. Um does that vary or radically change when you're doing it for agentic payments, or is are some of those controls really similar and aligned? So for example, I don't know if in a traditional um payment, in your traditional payment scheme, traditional crypto is not that traditional, but traditional relative to agentic payments, right? Um you I imagine maybe the business has control over like KYB, right? And how they're thinking about KYB and their users to some extent, right? Um you all have certain parameters that they have to hit. Um but does that differ heavily when you're thinking about the parameters and who has control of those parameters for agentic payments? I'm curious as to what that actually looks like.

Harris Leow 10:03

Great question. So the way I see it, or the way we have been approaching it at Reap, is actually bringing ourselves closer to the networks that are building the core infrastructure of agentic payments so that we can one ride on the existing controls that are already in place and we don't have to essentially rebuild them, but two, establish the best practices that will be needed in order for agentic payments to scale to the scale that non-agentic payments have. And I think that will be key. It's more of a collaboration, it's more of a partnership, it's more of being a design partner to all the stakeholders within the ecosystem so that REIT can essentially be the one-stop shop to enable and unlock agentic payments.

Maya Caddle 10:54

Got it. And I guess how I guess as part of that, we'll be thinking about how you manage, let's say, multi-agent systems where maybe there's a sub-agent or contractor agent or whatever, right? Um, and that's one of the interesting nuances about agentic payments. Um, how do you manage all these different systems that maybe it's one agent with one platform, but another agent that's been managed by another platform as well. Um, and yeah, we're still early on that front. Harris causes different interpretations of agentich payment protocols. But what's actually happening is two separate systems built by almost two separate sets of companies. And a player like Reap has to sit underneath both at once. Let's start with identity. This layer answers one question: Is it a legitimate agent or is it a bot? Visa's answer to this is called trusted agent protocol. It launched last October, built with Cloudflare. It signs an agent's identity into every transaction, checked in real time and gates a directory that Visa maintains. This sits on the merchant side, checking legitimacy before checkout even starts. A different job from what Harris described a moment ago, which happens on the issuer's side, inside the payments itself. And trusted payment protocol is really just one piece of something much bigger, that Visa is building as well. They call the whole thing Visa Intelligent Commons. It started rolling out to banks and issuers in Europe back in March, then expanded into APAC and Latam at the end of April. The clear signal is that Visa wants to be the trust layer everyone roots through, no matter which agent or which network is actually moving the money. Now, the second system to really focus on is to do with settlement. So, i.e., actually moving the money. And that's a different race entirely with protocols such as X402 gaining significant traction. Now back to the interview. I'd love to understand more about how the collateral engine actually works mechanically. So who holds it, um, how limits are set, what happens at settlement, what does this actually mean? And, you know, of course, for many payment execs and big institutions, they're very familiar with how cards work in a traditional sense, just with feat pure fiat rails. I'm intrigued for you to unpack what that looks like on-chain and how um Reap approaches that as well, specifically.

Turning Stablecoins Into Corporate Spending Power

Harris Leow 13:38

Great question. Um essentially, what's our secret source? Um, the easiest way to think about it is that the collateral engine is what transforms digital assets into usable spending power. Now, a customer begins by depositing stable coins such as USDC and USDT, which act as a collateral for the program, right? And once those funds are available, our platform can essentially allocate spending limits against that collateral, allowing cardholders to transact through the existing acceptance network just like any other commercial card. From the card holder's perspective, though, nothing feels different. They tap their card, the transaction is authorized, and the merchant receives payment through the existing cardrails. What is different though is that everything is happening behind the scenes. Every transaction is continuously reconciled against the collateral balance so that businesses have a real-time view of the available spending, right? The settlement obligations and treasury positions. So because the collateral is uh is already in place, businesses don't have to constantly move liquidity and working capital between banks, exchanges, and card providers to keep the programs funded. That's the real innovation. Um the collateral isn't just there for security, it becomes the funding engine for the entire card program, really. So, more broadly, we see this as part of a much bigger shift. Um, traditionally, businesses have had one system managing treasury and another managing payments. Our approach starts with bringing those two roles together, allowing digital assets to move beyond being something that businesses simply hold and instead become productive working capital that can directly fund day-to-day operations. Essentially, we're not trying to reinvent how people pay. We're reinventing how businesses fund payments. Um, and and the user experience needs to stay familiar, the infrastructure underneath becomes significantly uh more efficient.

Why Reap Chose Credit Over Debit

Maya Caddle 16:10

So I'm curious, right? Because one of the interesting things about Reap cards, right, is that um whereas most other cards are prepaid, right, from my understanding, Reap is more of a postpaid card. And so how does that work from a collateral and risk management perspective? Um, it's a different structure, and arguably it's um more akin to what you would see in a lot of traditional card rails, right? It's you know, we don't necessarily need to provide collateral on average to be able to leverage a card in most, at least developed economies. And so, how does the prepaid versus postpaid model work? And how are you actually able to do this leverage in crypto when many other players don't have this model?

Harris Leow 16:55

Absolutely spot on. Most crypto cards today are essentially prepaid cards, right? Prepaid debit cards. Every time you want to spend, you first have to sell or convert your crypto to fund the transaction. Your assets and your spending are very much tightly coupled. And this is where Reap differentiates ourselves. We took a different approach. With Reap, stable coins are used as collateral rather than as the payment itself. And that means businesses can lock value on the platform for spending against credit lines through the existing card networks. Now, why is that important? I think the first is that it creates a much better payment experience, right? Credit cards have a higher merchant acceptance and better interchange as compared to prepaid and debit cards. And in general, much stronger economics. Businesses don't have to change how they pay, only how the program is funded. Now, the second bit is that it separates treasury from spending. A business can essentially decide what assets it wants to hold as collateral while independently managing how and when it spends. Um, and that opens up an entirely new operating model. Today that might be stable coins, tomorrow it could be tokenized uh treasury, yield-bearing assets or other forms of uh digital collateral. Because the collateral and the spending engine are decoupled, the funding model becomes much more flexible over time and can scale with every card program. Now, ultimately, we didn't set up to build another crypto card. We built a programmable funding layer for commercial card programs. And that's why many of our customers aren't actually looking for a crypto product. They're looking for a faster way to launch a global card program without tying up working capital or rebuilding any financial infrastructure. I think a great way to exemplify this is one of the examples is a neobank that we work with that wanted to launch a stable coin back card program rather than spending, you know, over a year building issuing infrastructure, compliance, fraud systems, and integrating with payment networks. They essentially launched with Reap in under three months, just using Reap's white label cards as a service platform. From their customers' perspective, it behaves like a normal payment card. Behind the scenes, stablecoins provide the collateral funding while Reap handles the card issuance, compliance, and settlement, and essentially the global payments infrastructure. And I think that's really the philosophy behind the product. We aren't changing how people pay, we're changing how payment programs are funded.

The Hidden Challenge of Stablecoin Cards

Maya Caddle 19:58

I'm curious, right? So with, for example, the fact that you know, Reap and this is, you know, you you're it's a common, I guess, thread within the crypto industry, whether it comes to cards, whether it comes to lending protocols, right? Or borrow lend protocols, um, is the idea of needing collateral. For many in the traditional payments industry, right, their question is, well, why do we need collateral? Um, what does that look like? Um, what does that mean in the context of crypto? So of course it can be stable coins, of course it can be tokenized RWAs, but why is that collateralized model so fundamental and when it comes to cards in particular, obviously, um crypto native cards? I'm curious to get your thoughts on that.

Harris Leow 20:43

I think the collateral aspect essentially gives us the ability to expand our operating models across different types of card programs and cater to different personas of client portfolios as well, whether it's retail cards, commercial cards, Web3, or even Web2 card programs. And I think that's where the power and value of having a robust collateral engine uh comes in.

Maya Caddle 21:12

Put this next to how a traditional secured business card actually works. In a standard sponsored bank model, the structure that most banking as a service providers actually run on. A fintech partners with a chartered bank. So a chartered bank being the lights of a cross river or a statement bank. And the bank holds the bid, they're the issue of record, and they carry the regulatory relationship with the network. The fintech is a program manager sitting on top, and interchange usually gets splits between them at a negotiated figure, somewhere between the 60 to 80% range. For a secured version of this product, collateral usually takes the form of cash held in an FDI C insured. Deposit account at the same bank that's issuing the card. The bank takes a security interest and a right of set off against that specific account. Because the collateral and issuers sit inside one regulated balance sheet in one currency, the bank doesn't need to worry about cost asset basis risk. So LT fee is essentially 100% dollar for dollar and the risk model is closer to hold a CD, don't touch it, than active margining. But that structure has a hard dependency baked in. The business has to be bankable at the institution, in that currency, in that jurisdiction, before any of this works. It's exactly the population Reap is targeting. Those crypto native businesses, DeFi protocols, crypto exchanges, and separately, businesses in markets with underdeveloped banking. Because a chartered deposit-taking institution has real constraints around what counts as an acceptable deposit relationship. What makes Reap structure significant is that being a visa principal member directly rather than program manager under a sponsor bank means the collateral doesn't have to sit inside a chartered deposit account at all. It can sit with a third-party digital asset custodian denominated in USDC or USDT and Reap holds a security interest against that custodial position instead of a bank deposit. That decouples card issuance from local bank chartering entirely. A business anywhere can post stablecoin collateral once and get a card issued in USD or Hong Kong dollars, etc., without opening a local currency account in each market operates in. It also means Reap keeps a full interchange, or at least most of it, rather than splitting it with a sponsor because there is no sponsor. But there is a trade-off. And the trade-off is that Reap inherits a harder risk problem than the traditional model ever had to solve. A bank holding cash collateral in its own ledger has no repricing to do. The deposit and the credit line are the same currency, same institution, same instant. Reap's collateral is separate, custodied, technically distinct assets from the credit line it backs, which is why the engine has to continuously reconcile spend against collateral value in real time rather than relying on a static deposit relationship. Now, back to the interview. Going back slightly, right, there's something that you mentioned that actually triggered a thought, right? Um, I'm curious, right, going back to the point about collateral, and you know, your model is really interesting because of course it helps to manage time and floats, right? Which sometimes can be a challenge, a working capital challenge, right, for businesses that have a card scheme. But one of the equal challenges, and this is not just you, this is the crypto card industry more broadly, is that of course, when you have collateral, that's capital that is just locked up, right? That you have to have ready sitting idle. And especially if you're a business that your card program is continuing to scale, your collateral requirements will also scale. So, how does therefore card crypto native card programs really work at true large scale, given this collateral requirement? Is it something in the system or in the way in which these products can be built to help make that more manageable and more affordable for these businesses? Because not all businesses have that capital or at what level of working capital to just have sit parking idle. 100%.

Can Tokenized Treasuries Replace Idle Cash?

Harris Leow 25:48

100%. And so today, when we look at all these um working capital and car programs, there is this artificial uh separation between treasury management and payments, right? Finance teams, they they hold cash in one place to earn yield and then move it somewhere else when they need to pay suppliers, find employees, or make cross-border payments. All that that movement creates is idle capital, right? Operational friction and a lot of unnecessary settlement delays. I think what stablecoins and tokenized assets make possible is a different operating model where the same pool of working capital can simultaneously remain productive and be instantly deployable for payments. And that's a very powerful value proposition. Imagine a business treasury where idle balances are invested in tokenized treasury funds or other regulated deal-bearing assets, generating returns throughout the day. Then the moment an employee swipes a corporate card or a supplier payment is initiated, right, that that liquidity is made available instantly without finance teams manually moving money between multiple banks, wallets, and investment accounts. To me, that that is a real opportunity. The innovation isn't simply putting yield like on a card, it's it's turning treasury into programmable infrastructure where liquidity is always working, but it's always available. There's this that's very much aligned with the direction that we're building towards a Reap. We have recently, very recently, announced our integration with USYC, right? Which gives businesses access to tokenized uh yield-bearing treasury exposure directly with REIT direct. Uh, it's an important step because it extends our platform beyond payments and expense management into treasury optimization. Right, and our vision is to give finance teams a single operating platform where they can manage liquidity, earn yields on idle capital, issue corporate cards, make cross-border payments, and settle it all using either fiat or stablecoins, all without stitching together multiple providers. I don't think CFOs wake up in the morning wanting DeFi. You know, I want DeFi. They want better cash management. And and if if blockchain can help their working capital earn more, move faster, remain fully auditable and controllable, I think then the underlying technology becomes most um invisible, and that's when you know it's working.

Maya Caddle 28:49

That's the infrastructure that Reap has actually built underneath a simple card product, and it's why extending the eligible schedule from stable coins to a tokenized money market fund is a meaningfully different technical rift than itself. USDC and USDT or any US dollar stable coin is fundamentally priced against a one-to-one redemption check, i.e., is the peg holding yes or no? In contrast, a money market fund that is tokenized, well, its value is enough that accrues and needs a genuine price of fee, not just a peg check. The haircut that Reap decides to any tokenized money market fund should, by the logic of every other margin lending system that prices T-fill-based collateral be smaller than the haircut on a more volatile asset. But that only holds if the Oracle feeding that nav into the collateral engine is reliable and frequent enough to catch a redemption gate or a pricing dislocation before it becomes Reap's problem instead of the fight. Now, Reap has thought about this at length and we'll be exploring this and more shortly. So let's go back to the interview. So most corporate card programs, right, they make money on interchange. Um, your model, of course, layers interchange with FX spread and subscription fees. Um, how do these three revenue lines interact and which one scales fastest as volumes grow?

How Stablecoins Change Card Economics

Harris Leow 30:31

Great question. Um I I don't think I don't think stable coins disintermediate cart networks overnight. I think they they actually force the economics to to evolve. Um cart networks have, you know, when we look back in time, right, have adapted through every major real shift in payments. Online commerce, uh mobile wallets, real-time payments, open banking, and and now stable coins. The reason is simple. The acceptance network is extremely hard to replicate. Hundreds of millions of merchants already accept these networks, right? And that value is very hard, incredibly hard to replicate. So interchange isn't only a settlement fee, it actually also supports the broader card ecosystem with network access, authorizations, dispute handlings, all those good stuff. Um and all these things on-chain rails do not yet replicate at a global consumer scale. So my view, yeah, my view is that interchange survived, but it becomes more new nuanced. In some corridors and in some use cases, stablecoin settlement may compress parts of the economics. In others, the value of instant funding, global acceptance, risk uh management, and regulated infrastructure may justify a different fee model altogether. So for Reap, that is exactly why our strategy is not um dependent on one revenue line or one rail. Our role is to sit at the intersection of um stablecoin infra and the cart network infra. So our visa principal membership in Hong Kong and Mexico are important because they allow us to participate uh directly in how these new models develop rather than simply reacting from the outside. Right? So over time, I think winners will be companies that can essentially bridge both worlds. The real the reliability, the compliance, the acceptance of traditional card networks with the speed, programmability, and settlement efficiency of stablecoins. I think that is where Reap is very much uniquely positioned. We're not betting that one rail destroys the other. We're betting that the future of payments is going to be hybrid and that businesses will need infrastructure that can operate across both.

Maya Caddle 33:12

Harris names three revenue lines, but what's really interesting is understanding what stablecoins enables or how stable coins transform these revenue lines. So let's double down on interchange in particular. In a normal card program, interchange revenue and settlement timing are locked together. The issuer collects interchange on authorization. Let's double down on interchange in particular. In a normal card program, interchange revenue and settlement timing are locked together. The issuer collects interchange on authorization, but funding that authorization actually settling with the acquirer and getting reimbursed runs on the card network's clearance cycle. So typically a T plus 1 or T plus 2 wire or ATH movement through correspondent banking. Reap can collect the same interchange on the authorization side, fully on Visa's Rails, while funding its own settlement obligations using stablecoin liquidity that moves in minutes rather than days. That's not a new fee. It's the same interchange revenue with a working capital drag underneath it, structurally shortened. Which matters because the funding gap is exactly the kind of locked up capital Paris was describing earlier as the industry's core scaling constraint. Reap is amongst the top tier when it comes to like cards within crypto, the crypto industry. Um, and I actually want obviously you are an Asian-based company. Um, and I wanted to touch start by touching upon that. So Asia now accounts for roughly 60% of global stablecoin payment volume, um, according to a recent study by McKinsey and Artemis. You were building in Hong Kong, right? Before most of the West had any clear regulatory framework, before the Genius Act, etc. Um, what did you see in Asia that made it structurally more ready for stablecoin payments than in the US or in Europe?

Why Asia Is Leading Stablecoin Adoption

Harris Leow 35:21

That's uh that's a great question, Maya. I I actually think we had the opposite mindset to a lot of other companies. We didn't choose to build in Asia because it was easier. We actually chose to build here because it was actually harder and more complex. Because if you can solve payments in Asia, you practically can solve payments almost anywhere. So maybe what would be good is a quick introduction about Reap and what we do, and then the story will tell itself. So Reap is essentially a stablecoin native infrastructure that powers card programs and payments for businesses uh globally. What Reap is in a nutshell is that we connect stablecoin settlements with global banking rails and cart networks into a single platform, allowing fintechs, enterprises, neobanks, and financial institutions to launch payment card products without having to build the underlying infrastructure themselves. Um, and on the head of Product for Reap, so I take care of all the products that underlie this infrastructure that we have uh here at Reap. So back to why Asia. If we think about the reality of the region, you're dealing with dozens of currencies, fragmented banking systems, different regulatory regimes, varying payment rails, and cross-border settlements that you know can take days, right? It's one of the most operationally complex payment environments in the world. Now, that complexity has actually forced us to build differently from day one. So instead of designing, you know, for a single market or a single payment rail, we essentially built a platform that could operate across multiple currencies, jurisdictions, banking partners, and networks, right? And now even stablecoin settlements, all through that single infrastructure API layer. Um, Hong Kong was particularly strategic to do that because it's it's the world's largest FX hub, right? It's one of the few places where multiple major currencies settle efficiently and increasingly a global center for regulated digital assets. It sits at the intersection of traditional finance and kind of the next generation of financial infrastructure. What we saw early was that stable coins weren't simply a crypto innovation, they were a better settlement rail for one of Asia's biggest problems, which is moving money across borders quickly and efficiently. So, because of that insight, it has become increasingly relevant everywhere else. And so today we see that you know in the US, Europe, they are arriving at many of the same conclusions around stablecoin regulation and adoption. But because we started in Asia, and we started with the hard stuff, we have already spent years building the operational infrastructure that businesses actually need, right? The compliance, the treasury, the issuance, the FX, the cross-border settlement. So in hindsight, building in Asia wasn't just an early bet on stable coins. It was actually an early bet that the future payments would be multi-currency, multi-real, and global just by default. And that's exactly the world that we're operating in today.

Maya Caddle 38:43

Here's a concrete version of the problem Harris is describing. A single currency ledger, the kind that most card programs start with, stores balances as one number in one denomination. And every downstream system, so authorization, special mode, reconciliation, etc., inherits that assumption. Adding a second currency later isn't a config change. It usually means actually re-architecting the ledger to currency to carry a currency field on every balance and transaction. That's a retrofit tax multi-market fintechs almost always pay. And it's visible in how different near banks have expanded internationally. The ones that launched single market fairs have generally taken years to bolt on multi-currency support property. But in contrast, there's the ones that built multi-currency support from day one. Likewise, and of course, like Reap, they could add corridors incrementally without touching the core ledger. So Reap skipped that expansion tax entirely, but not by choice. Parents is fairly direct that APAC's fragmentation didn't leave room to build that single market version first. What that means concretely is a ledger, the compliance model and the settlement logic were multi-currency and multi-jurisdiction from the first line of code, which is a fundamentally different and arguably harder engineering and compliance and business starting point than adding markets on later. Most companies don't choose that starting point voluntarily because it's slower to reach this first working version. But Reef's argument is that it's the only starting point that scales cleanly afterward. And I mean it worked for Reap, right? And huge congratulations, of course, on that. You had a really strong 2025. Um, how do you see this acquisition furthering your growth?

Inside Kraken's Acquisition of Reap

Harris Leow 40:54

Um, firstly, thank you for that. Uh we are all of us um at Reap are incredibly excited about it. So, from from my perspective, the acquisition actually doesn't change our strategy. The best part is that it accelerates it. And we've always believed the future of payments is built on combining stablecoin infrastructure with traditional financial rails, right? And and that's exactly what we have uh been building at Reap. What this acquisition does is gives us more of the infrastructure regulatory reach and distribution needed to execute that vision at a much grander and larger scale. As you mentioned, 2025 was already a breakout year for us. We tripled both revenue and payment volume, and today process more than 10% of the global cart link stablecoin volume. That momentum has given us confidence that the market is real and that we have very, very strong product market fit. Now, this acquisition simply gives us a much bigger platform to build from. So one of the biggest advantages is regulatory reach. Payward brings established licenses across the US and Europe, right? Opening markets and payment corridors that you know would have taken us years to build organically. The second is infrastructure. Access to much deeper liquidity pools, custody, and settlement capabilities means we can continue improving our products while scaling globally with much greater efficiency. The third is distribution. Hayward already serves nearly a thousand nine hundred B2B partners. Over time, those businesses become a natural audience for Reaps embedded card issuance and cross-border payment capabilities. From a product perspective, this is incredibly exciting. Instead of spending years, you know, building every market, right, getting every license and distributing and establishing distribution channels ourselves, we can focus on energy on what actually differentiates us, which is building products that make stable coin infrastructure useful for businesses. So I see this acquisition as a force multiplier. It gives us a skill, infra, and global reach to execute the strategy that we were already pursuing, but much faster.

The Future of Stablecoin Payments

Maya Caddle 43:30

This is genuinely a smart acquisition for Kraken, and it's narrower than buy-in growth. Kraken already has liquidity, it has custody and settlement infrastructure at scale. That's the core of what it runs. What was missing was direct issuing rights outside of the US and EU. Visa principal membership is underwritten market by market over years. And Reap has already done the heavy lifting. I mean, it's done it in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. So some of the key Latan and APAC corridors that would be strategically important for Kraken. Now, secondly, let's look think about it from the Reap perspective. Everything in this episode, the collateral engine, the post-paid credit structure, the money market fund integration, they all depend upon collateral sitting somewhere and being managed well. Kraken's balance sheet and custody infrastructure gives Reap deeper liquidity to run that collateral engine at a scale that it couldn't reach independently. Plus, of course, it gives it a distribution channel. Harris calls it an accelerant rather than a strategy change. And on the numbers, that's an accurate read. Reap doesn't need Kraken to know what to build next, it needs Kraken's balance sheet to build it faster. Third, the mechanism underneath it all. The collateral engine is functionally a stablecoin collateralized credit facility, not a debit rail. That structural choice is what puts Reap's transactions on credit interchange schedules rather than the capped debit and prepaid schedules most cryptocards are stuck on. And it's why Reap holds full interchange directly rather than splitting it with a sponsor back. And of everything covered in this episode, the agentic payment architecture is probably the piece worth watching most closely. What Reap has actually built there is a delegated authorization model. A human science and spending policy once via pass key. That single authentication event gets referenced for every subsequent agent transaction. And the checkout challenge gets surpassed or suppressed because the liability shift already happened upstream. That's real infrastructure, not a roadmap. And Reap already sits on visa's agentic ready issue a list for APAC. But it's worth being precise about what's solved and what isn't. A scope token proves a transaction is valid within policy, not that it reflects actual intent. And Harris said directly that multi-agent delegation and agent scope narrow in correctly as it gets handed down to sub agents. Well, that's still being built. And that's something for the whole industry to really think about and reflect. And that's mint condition. Thanks for listening.