Lukasz Dec

Building B2B stablecoin payment infrastructure in MENA. 18+ yrs product leadership in startups, banking & fintech. Stablecoins, cross-border rails, payments.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@Simplicity_Dan @leonabboud Hi @leonabboud, ticking all the boxes. Happy to high five in Miami 🫡

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Sundays are for touching grass. Not many of these left before Dubai summer makes it impossible. Back to building stablecoin infra for MENA tomorrow 🫡

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Super insightful thread, thank you for sharing @shazia_ghani 🙏

What I'm seeing from the UAE side is that private stablecoin infrastructure is moving 10x faster than mBridge timelines. Bank from your point 4 will have stablecoin in production before an AED CBDC goes live, even though development started much later.

Within a closed circle, mBridge can work for gov-linked payments, but do you think there's a viable path for CBDCs to catch up on the commercial side?

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Three years in UAE and one thing still catches me off guard: the speed of relationship-building here.

In Europe, trust takes months. In the UAE, you can meet someone at a padel court on Tuesday (or over breakfast) and be in a serious business conversation by Thursday.

It's not that people here are less careful, it's that people move here to build something. That shared intent compresses the trust timeline in ways I've never experienced anywhere else.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Every stablecoin product team is now asking the same question: where's the line between "passive" and "activity-based"?

The CLARITY Act is definitely a big win... But it isn't clean just yet and I believe that for multi-jurisdictional builders, the complexity just doubled.

The distinction between 'passive' and 'activity-based' will shape how every stablecoin wallet, card program, and savings product gets designed for the next couple of years.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Tokenized RWAs crossed $26 billion on-chain this month. A year ago it was $6.5 billion. Six asset categories now above $1 billion each — treasuries, private credit, commodities, corporate bonds, government debt, and institutional alt funds.

We're definitely way past the 'crypto experiment' phase.

For builders in the MENA region, the question is whether Gulf markets can attract a meaningful share of this capital or watch it concentrate on Ethereum and US-regulated platforms.

The UAE has the regulatory head start. Now it needs the infrastructure to match.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@ZeusRWA The problem is we keep measuring crypto's impact by what retail users see. And end up with memecoins and NFTs.

Blockchain tech was always awesome, but the significance is hiding in the plumbing (assets on-chain, settlement, infra, stablecoins).

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

This is so spot on. Marty Cagan wrote a while ago about a similar “product builder” concept. Being an (ex)founder with deep product sense will become more and more advantageous.

[signüll @signulll]

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person.

when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that.

i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it.

& the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start.

the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled.

before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@gregosuri Yeah, valid point, but worth separating two things: transferring USDC wallet to wallet has zero slippage. Swapping between different stablecoins has the same issues as tradfi FX. The difference is that stablecoins will sooner or later solve this.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

In B2B payments, speed is table stakes. That's why orchestration alone isn't enough to make stablecoins work for real businesses.

What actually matters, especially in MENA (some really tough corridors are here):
→ predictable settlement windows
→ reconciliation evidence
→ exception handling

If your payment rail only works when everything is perfect, it’s not infrastructure.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@gccstartupnews @MoneyHashHQ @waylpayments Nice! Iraq is underserved and complex, exactly where orchestration adds the most value. Curious to see how stablecoin settlement layers start plugging into platforms like this across the region.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@AboutRWAs This is big news! This is big news! Very curious if Mastercard will become the rails or would rather rely on independent settlement infrastructure.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@_paydao Great to see states shipping while the feds debate :) Same energy in the UAE, arguably even ahead of states. Are you guys looking into MENA with your pos solution?

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@web3_lord Grinding since 2019. Stablecoins and RWAs feels relatively rekt proof in this market, and this is what I'm working on. Let's catch up :)

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@singhabhinav Nice breakdown, open finance went down similar route previously with recurring payments. Curious how this all evolves with agentic payments and things like pay per request over x402. Might be that push/pull narrative won't be even that relevant without human in the loop?

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

Are stablecoin payments still a cross-border story? It's time for the narrative to catch up.

→ 74% of stablecoin payment volume is domestic
→ Payment transaction count grew +107% YoY
→ C2B grew +131% while average ticket size declined
→ Velocity moved from ~2.6x to ~6x since Jan 2024

This is a maturity pattern. Stablecoins are being absorbed into repeat commercial workflows.

This is exactly the pattern we're building for in MENA. It's not about speed, speed already became table stakes.

We're focusing on compliance confidence in production, and local stablecoin support with onchain FX.

Trustworthy execution is the moat.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@richardchen39 The uncrowded side is uncrowded because it requires working closely with regulators and banks, not just vibe-coding dev tools.

I'm building across non-USD stablecoins and onchain FX from the UAE and it's looking very promising.

[Lukasz Dec @lukaszdec]

@masonnystrom Very interesting. If 74% of flows are domestic than USD-peg is becoming a friction. It's very aligned with direction I'm working on from the UAE, where banks are betting hard on non-USD stablecoins.