Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I don't think we're going to get to or should get to people being broadly 100% Bitcoin, but I think it'll be much higher than where we are today.
I mean, one remarkable thing about stablecoins, which are, for the most part, dollar-denominated tokens that are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but they live on blockchains. And I think over the past few years, stablecoins have grown to over $200 billion on-chain. And they're starting to be used in sort of real use cases outside of crypto.
They were originally conceived, actually, to be a way to facilitate crypto trading. It's how you on-ramp to certain exchanges abroad and got dollars in, dollars out. But now, companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to move money around.
And a lot of others will have this corporate treasury use case where they'll generate revenue in some country, let's say in Africa or Latin America, and want to repatriate those dollars back to the U.S. And so they'll use some local exchange to trade the local currency for stablecoins, and then they can just send those stablecoins over the wire.
And that's ultimately a cheaper FX transaction than doing it the other way.
So it's a payment rail that's 24-7, global, and programmable. I think those are pretty key. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where the internet is 24-7, but payments closes over the weekend. So in some sense, this is just modernizing finance and payments in a way that we're already used to with the internet.
And a lot of the fintech innovation has actually been product and go to market innovation on top of antiquated backends. And you can think of crypto as building a new finance backend from the ground up. I think one way to view the programmable financial system or one frame on it is as a two-sided market between assets and programs.
So every financial activity we undertake through a traditional institution or through an app is some kind of program. There's logic that governs who pays who and what. Maybe there's an escrow or maybe there's a payment condition. Think insurance or mortgages or payroll. All of these things are payment with insurance. programming on top of it in an abstract sense.
And all of that is possible to build on these new crypto rails. But there's a bootstrapping problem because most people don't trust the rails or use the rails. There aren't a lot of assets there. So there's this bootstrap between assets and programs. And I think what's interesting about stablecoins, we've been bootstrapping the crypto native money for a while. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana.
With stablecoins, we now have a very widely used monetary asset, to your point, without any of the volatility or crypto hair. And I think for the first time, we're starting to see people build all these different ways you can program and use them.
And I think 10, 20, 30 years from now, it seems inevitable to me that basically all of our financial transactions will run through rails like this in some
I think a recent and topical example is the prediction market platforms, which are these contracts that say you deposit X dollars. And if X person wins the election and you bet on that person, you get paid. If the other person wins the election, you don't get paid. That logic is represented in a smart contract. There's a crypto-based way of resolving that event.
And so that's an example where that wasn't possible before us.
Well, I think a really interesting frontier, which is still super fuzzy, is the intersection of AI and crypto. In a lot of ways, like if AI is intelligence, crypto is a way of coordinating intelligences. And that's really what money is. It's a database of value, and we shift it around. That's the coordination mechanism of capitalism, say.
And it seems to me that I have a hard time visualizing if AI agents really take off and become possible for them to primarily be transacting through traditional systems. Crypto is basically tailor-made for computer sentience to use. And I think right now a lot of people are focused on the idea of just agents paying each other or paying for things on the internet.
But I think an interesting step further is you could think of crypto as ways to construct markets for participants to engage in. If you wanted to run some kind of auction or allocate a scarce resource through purely programmatic means, crypto is sort of made for that.
And so I would envision a world in which AI agents are basically constructing more elaborate ways of coordinating with each other beyond just payments.
Well, one, we have a team that is very curiosity first. Part of our process is everyone on the team can spend time looking at and investigating whatever they want. And so we have plenty of people who are super fascinated by AI. We actually spent some time going down that rabbit hole exploring it and ultimately decided that, okay, one, we're definitely interested in the intersection.
I think right now might be some of the most interesting times in that space. But also, I think there are extreme returns to specialization. And there's also a sense in which AI is, everyone's working on it, and it's going to be fine with or without us. I think crypto is a very important technology that needs to coexist with AI. That, to your point, there aren't a lot of great champions.
And we believe it's very important for us to work on it to make sure that it actually happens.
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