Zaheer Ebtikar

speaker

444 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Zaheer Ebtikar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Talking Tokens: Crypto, Onchain Finance, Investing · Why Plasma Bet Everything on USDT When Nobody Believed in Stablecoin Chains | Zaheer Evtakar, Plasma · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah.

So I mean I I think one thing that that we should caveat is that when we were starting off this kind of pitch of a stablecoin chain or a you know very specific chain thesis, um, we had a lot of pushback from investors, the market, everyone asking why we needed this.

Um and I think not to take the credit for this, but we've probably been the most vindicated vertical, I think, in the last couple of years, uh maybe outside of the perp dux vertical.

Um and that really kinda comes down to one thing, which is st I think people didn't really understand the massive TAM that stablecoins had and also what kind of trade-offs were needed in order to facilitate only stablecoin activity.

So now you see it with tempo arc, you see it with you know things like the open standard, which you know we we can talk about later in the in the podcast as well.

Um, and a lot of this more stablecoin specific infrastructure.

So when we took this bet, it was much more of a contrarian bet.

I think you know part of the reason why we were really focused on this kind of outcome was to see if anything at the fundamental layer of the blockchain could be changed in order to be more optimized for stablecoins.

So things around content.

confidentiality, not privacy, things around, you know, making sure that you know you could correct connect way better with you know existing uh financial infrastructure APIs um and trying to make stable coins not this esoteric kind of web three only uh you know f financial tool but instead having it connect to the real world.

I think there's I mean, honestly we we you know, our team is a team of, you know, I think uh very native folks.

So we always look at what our own behavior is and we found that, you know, for people that are global, for people that are distributed, we were just using stable coins for everything that we did anyway.

Um and you know, everything outside of this was it was very obvious that the that the use case for stable coins was way more than just exchange deposits.

And trading.

Um, and we were using it for everything that we possibly could between each other.

The problem was that you know, when we were had to interact with anything in the real world, going from stable coins to you know a fiat deposit was very you know kind of complicated and also not really liked by any sort of Western institution.

So if you try to go to a bank and you hit you know have a massive wire from Coinbase or you know a trading desk or something like this, this was obviously a problem.

So we wanted to kind of destigmatize that as much as possible.

I think when it comes to um you know let's just talk about like w when when we got that flack from investors

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