Stabledash

New Media for New Money 💸. Live show every Tues and Thurs at 9am PST / 12pm EST

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"AI will reduce your bottom line and stablecoins will ultimately increase your top line."

@kvreem saw this coming early.

He positioned @EntendreAI to build FOR stablecoin native companies, instead of building one himself. As stablecoins began to solve real problems, the winners would grow into massive businesses onchain with complex books to close.

So he built the accounting tooling those companies would need to scale.

Before Entendre, he built cash management systems at Workday, then joined WeWork at peak valuation, where 300+ accountants couldn't keep up with the accounting at scale.

When ChatGPT launched, he founded Entendre with his brother Omar and designer Andy, and the three of them built AI accounting software for some of the fastest growing organizations in the world. They built agents to automate stablecoin and digital asset accounting for companies like Polygon Labs, Brale, Courtyard, and Babylon Labs.

In the last 12 months, their customers have raised over $1 billion in venture capital.

Last month @moonpay acquired the company to power the financial operations layer of the stablecoin economy.

His bet: by 2030 half the accountants will have retired, every dollar moving onchain still has to land in a ledger, and agents are how the books get kept.

Kareem's conversation with @dr3wrogers:

1:30 - Youngest engineer on Workday's financial side

6:44 - Why everyone used to fight over the general ledger

10:11 - WeWork at peak valuation and 300 accountants falling behind

13:05 - How he built Cloud Kitchens' money platform from scratch

19:22 - 3 million CPAs, $100T GDP, and 50% retiring by 2030

21:04 - Why stablecoins grow top line and AI cuts bottom line

23:41 - Three levels of AI adoption and where most people are stuck

29:00 - How ChatGPT's launch led to founding Entendre

31:29 - Customers who've raised over $1 billion in VC

35:37 - Polygon Labs: 32 legal entities on one platform

37:51 - Dual Entry and the $90M AI-native ERP partnership

38:33 - Why MoonPay acquired Entendre

43:17 - First startup, first exit, first time raising capital

52:44 - 10x revenue growth and the 2025 inflection point

Episode 0052. Presented to you by @altitude

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"They don't have to even know about chains at all," says @akelani at @circle while pitching a consumer wallet where the user never picks a network.

"You want to abstract it away from the user. You just want to show one balance. That user can spend USDC wherever. You can just have a unified balance and spend on any chain."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"Money should move as quickly as information does on the internet, and we have the technology to do that. So let's make it happen." Says Brian Alapatt at @raincards

Rain closed a $250 million Series C led by @ICONIQCapital to issue stablecoin-backed cards.

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Banks shouldn't have to KYC the same customer twice.

"What BVNK does is we have an embedded program that allows you to embed stablecoin wallets into your platform. It allows us to send, receive, store, and convert stablecoins on your customer's behalf."

"We can essentially ingest the KYC process that the bank has already done on a customer to quickly spin up a stablecoin wallet for them."

@TylerSherwin, VP of Sales at @BVNKFinance

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"If I have an account with JP Morgan and you have an account with Goldman Sachs and I send you this deposit token, it's going to be like the old days' bank notes."

"You need a central clearing party that can secure the par value for you so you can move those settlement assets and settle on chain. But your counterpart that has an account with Goldman Sachs, you're not going to accept a JP Morgan deposit token."

@BorjaNeira_, Market Development at @Tempo

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"There's a lot of misconceptions about China."

"People don't realize that China is actually one of the most technologically advanced places in the world. Because of its size, it's such a competitive market that Chinese companies actually need to start looking abroad in order to stay alive. If you look at China's economy, prices have stayed the same since 2018. It's actually deflationary."

"If you're a Chinese merchant, you don't want Venezuelan pesos, you don't want Colombian pesos, you don't want Nigerian naira. You want either Chinese, or you want dollars. So there is such a huge demand from them to be able to collect these payments from all over the world."

@mansa_mlk at @mansa_fi settles cross-border payments in China.

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Closing a deal with a family-run Mexican conglomerate took @0xdirichlet at @sphere_labs over a year of relationship-building.

"They might import raw goods from Southeast Asia and then process them here in Mexico and then ultimately ship them out to the United States or to Europe, and each leg within this involves a 30-plus year relationship vouch."

"You can bring an incredible product to their face but it's no longer about is this thing 10x better than everything else on market, it's is this thing sufficiently better than what we use today such that even though I'm not a domain expert in this product category I now feel comfortable vouching for this company and for the people that I know at this company to my 30-plus year relationship."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"We were fully regulated about four years ago. After two years in a sandbox, we think we were the first company out of Bermuda to get dual license on the digital asset and on the insurance side."

@onredan saw two ways blockchain could enter insurance:
> insure crypto assets, or
> bring the insurance industry itself onchain
@onrefinance spent seven years on the second path.

"For six years, we spent a long time solving hard problems."

"The whole insurance industry now has this new infrastructure that can come online and tokenize their programs and connect to a new source of capital and that capital can participate in this very uncorrelated profitable industry."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Airwallex didn't need stablecoins a year ago.

Now they've incubated the Metal Network, their own settlement chain, says @0xdirichlet

"The obvious attraction is that you get to control, you get to verticalize the settlement layer. But what's harder to see is that settlement state itself is so commoditized." App chains already ran this experiment, argues the founder of @sphere_labs

"They're dedicated environments for things from perps to borrowing and lending to privacy, and they run into very similar problems regardless of who is creating it and how big the crater is."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"We think we're probably the most liquid reinsurer in the world. DeFi liquidity is more of a shrug for the crypto market, but for reinsurance it's a big deal."

@onredan at @onrefinance says the product lets DeFi participants choose their own risk level.

"You end up with senior and junior tranche tokens. You can lend if you want to take a more senior position, you can loop if you want to take a more junior position, so there's a risk curve that people can participate on."

"There's a liquid bridge now that connects capital markets and the reinsurance sector."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"A stablecoin is only as good as its ability to move in and out of local currency."

"If I was in any emerging market and I tried to change USDT on Tron versus USDT on Ethereum, I would get way less slippage with USDT on Tron because there's a lot more demand for that."

"One thing that these chains forget or don't really realize is the power of distribution, especially local distribution. Having people on the ground that will accept your money and that will trade on your chain."

@mansa_mlk at @mansa_fi put the same test to the OpenUSD launch.

"I saw the Open USD announcement. It's great. You have some of the world's biggest fintechs. But how about the consumers that actually use it? How are they gonna access it?"

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Stablecoin ramp margins are going to zero, argues @0xdirichlet at @sphere_labs

"I could have told you two and a half years ago that USD stablecoin would go to zero. The same thing's going to happen for all the different spot currencies, at least in single-hop payments."

"The idiot index for doing an on and off ramp for Circle or Tether into USD, including third-party delivery, is like single digit basis points, if not lower. So it can't be the underpinning of a venture-backed business or venture-scale business."

"The stablecoins are more like an afterthought. And the competition, the hard game, is somewhere else, in the user acquisition and retention."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Reinsurance yield in DeFi now comes with catastrophe risk modeling, says @onredan at @onrefinance

"What's a potential NAV drawdown on a hurricane event, or a two times hurricane event, or a one in a hundred kind of exposure in the US? These kinds of things people can start to quantify."

"We have a transparency dashboard. It outlines our individual reinsurance contracts so people can see geographical exposure, overall limits - the total potential loss over a single contract - the premium that relates to that contract, which is received in full at the beginning, 100% reserved for covering expected claims, and then accrues to the NAV price every 24 hours."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"The reason why I built MANSA is because I actually have a vendetta against Western Union. If anybody from Western Union is watching this, know that I'm coming after your a**."

@mansa_mlk built @mansa_fi after years of sending remittances through Western Union as a student in Hong Kong.

"When I went to college in Hong Kong at 17 years old, I couldn't get a bank account. So my parents would send me money by Western Union. I'm not the most punctual person. I would arrive literally one minute late and they would say the system is closed. Or I would walk to the Western Union and think about how much money I would get, having already spent it in my mind. And I would get to Western Union and then ask the fees, I'd be like, what the hell? How come it's so expensive?"

"When you really think about it from a first principles basis, it's because of liquidity. Coming from a family that has traditionally done business with emerging markets, you realize that the system is incredibly unfair and the fees are incredibly expensive."

"To anybody building anything in stablecoins or anything in general, I would recommend building something that you can relate to, building something that you have a deep passion to, and that can guide you as well. That's what separates missionaries from mercenaries."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"Tokenization is basically packaging, it's not a product. What is a product is collateralization and liquidity," argues @ArtemTolkachev, Chief RWA Officer at @falconfinance

"If RWAs are just coming onchain and sit onchain and nobody can use them, or five wallets can touch them and they're not doing anything other than sit and earn some yield, it doesn't make much sense."

[Stabledash @stabledash]

OnRe manages $200M in tokenized reinsurance and says it has no interest in becoming a tokenization platform.

"There are plenty of more generic tokenization platforms. We're not necessarily that excited about competing in that space. Reinsurance is our key competency, and it's a huge space that we haven't even scratched the surface of. So this is our vertical."

"The insurers themselves are able to transfer the metadata on all the business that they're writing by an API. That's a big step for a large insurer."

"We see ourselves opening up channels for traditional capital to be able to flow into our markets and tap into secondary liquidity without having to touch wallets and other web-three type infrastructure."

@onredan, Co-Founder & CEO of @onrefinance

[Stabledash @stabledash]

MANSA's Mouloukou Sanoh spent 22 of his 30 years in China.

"What people don't understand is that China is actually the reason why a lot of these emerging markets started adopting stablecoins. Because if you look at the map of the places that have the largest stablecoin volume, it's also the places that trade with China more. And Chinese merchants, because of capital controls, actually started demanding to get paid in USDT."

@dr3wrogers asked what advantage growing up there gave him.

"In the unfortunate geopolitical situation that we're in, people don't realize that China is actually one of the most technologically advanced places in the world, but also because of its size, it's such a competitive market that Chinese companies actually need to start looking abroad in order to stay alive."

"If you look at China's economy, prices have stayed the same since 2018, it's actually deflationary."

"But if you're a Chinese merchant, you don't want Venezuelan pesos, you don't want Colombian pesos, you don't want Nigerian naira, you want either Chinese Yuan or you want dollars."

@mansa_mlk, Founder & CEO of @mansa_fi on the show.

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"Our original proposition was the worst of both worlds."

"We were too many innovative steps for the insurance market where capital was crypto-denominated and custody was in a smart contract and trustees were multi-sigs."

The repositioning put $140 million in insurance limits on the books in six months, says @onredan

"The shift was really going from the worst of both worlds to the best of both worlds, where you have DeFi composability, a single product, but then you have a structure that works for the insurance industry."

"You don't have to reinvent the wheel across every single aspect of the business. Go to where things are already working and then just innovate the bits that aren't working."

Co-Founder & CEO of @onrefinance on stabledash live yesterday

[Stabledash @stabledash]

"My law firm was acquired by Deloitte. I was building a blockchain practice there, advising banks and regulators."

"I decided to build a platform for issuance and secondary trading of tokenized securities. It was 2018. Later, we turned it into a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by corporate bonds. It was 2021. The project closed in 2022, partially for geopolitical reasons. But it taught me the lesson."

"Putting an asset on chain means literally nothing by itself. It was possible in 2018. It's even more possible now. But if an asset is not working on chain, if it's just there, it doesn't mean anything."

"An asset goes on chain to do something, to unlock liquidity, to work as collateral, to plug into other things."

@ArtemTolkachev, Chief RWA Officer @falconfinance on the show.

[Stabledash @stabledash]

Airwallex didn't need stablecoins a year ago.

Now they've incubated the Metal Network, their own settlement chain, says @0xdirichlet

"The obvious attraction is that you get to control, you get to verticalize the settlement layer. But what's harder to see is that settlement state itself is so commoditized." App chains already ran this experiment, argues the founder of @sphere_labs

"They're dedicated environments for things from perps to borrowing and lending to privacy, and they run into very similar problems regardless of who is creating it and how big the crater is."