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Day 2 of Permissionless is underway in Brooklyn. If you, like me, aren’t on the ground, you don’t have to just wallow in your FOMO. You can check out the livestreams to the stages and tracks here. 

Day 1 was pretty packed with alpha, from the 0xResearch team having an interesting — and pretty bullish — convo around pump.fun to my colleague Jack Kubinec sitting down with some big-brained folks to talk about retaining users in crypto (one of the toughest jobs for a founder). 

But don’t just take my word for it; check out some of the video clips we’ve already put out.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Mass adoption

“We’ve seen a huge influx of demand for our stablecoin infrastructure in general,” Paxos Head of Strategy Walter Hessert told me.

So perhaps the Monday announcement that Mastercard was joining the Global Dollar Network wasn’t totally surprising. 

“Mastercard is bringing the power of its global franchise to support a growing portfolio of regulated stablecoins from issuers around the world,” Mastercard said.

Hessert noted that Paxos has had a “long relationship” with the credit card company, and has been behind the scenes “powering some of the innovations that they’ve brought to market for their customers, leveraging stablecoin blockchain, etc.”

He noted that firms like Mastercard are recognizing that there’s a need for stablecoins, and that’s why we’re seeing a pickup in both the demand and firms finding ways to get involved. 

Speaking of the demand, though, “the current… stablecoin models are not really meeting the needs of the market.”

The conversations Paxos is currently having with TradFi firms — not just Mastercard — focus on how institutions can utilize stablecoin rails, especially since Hessert noted that it’s “extremely low-cost and virtually free.”

The focus is on figuring out “the right kind of technology and tooling to be equally compliant, in some cases even more compliant, than other types of rails for money. And so they want to start to leverage the rails. And so maybe they have commercial clients. They want to allow those commercial clients to [move money using stablecoins the] same way they would allow them to move a payment using a wire or some RTT system,” he said. 

The other big conversation happening behind the scenes (and this shouldn’t be a terribly big surprise) is that banks specifically are trying to figure out how they can safely and successfully issue stablecoins. 

Admittedly, one aspect I’m particularly curious about around Paxos is where it sees itself as stablecoin adoption picks up. 

The Global Dollar Network, which promotes enterprise adoption of stablecoins through USDG, has given some firms a chance to have “shared ownership and shared economics,” as well as helping firms figure out product-market fit, Hessert said. And that helps them stand out against Circle’s USDC. 

“We’ve also issued $150 billion as a firm on a gross basis of stablecoins today,” he noted. 

So, what’s next?

While the GENIUS Act that passed the Senate isn’t supportive of yield-bearing stablecoins, Hessert said that he’s noticed interest pick up in a different area.

“I do think that there is a large interest from banks in tokenized deposits. And this has been part of the conversation now for several years, and I think that there is a kind of renewed interest in this, with the draft of the GENIUS act…for banks to start to explore what it means to tokenize deposits and how those then interact with stablecoins,” he said.

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• BitGo’s assets in custody topped $100 billion. 

• The Bank for International Settlements isn’t so sold on stablecoins. 

• Coinbase said it helped federal agents seize $225 million in “stolen” crypto.

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Permissionless IV is where the builders behind all of it meet for 3 days.

📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn