Tether Co-Founder Reeve Collins: Banking Becomes A Utility

“Tether is the bridge”

Collins does not describe stablecoins as a revolution. He describes them as a format change. “Stable coins is simply currency, the same type of currency,” he said. “It’s still dollars. It’s just formatted to work on a better infrastructure.”

The pitch is speed. “Tether is the bridge of the traditional financial infrastructure, which is slow and antiquated, to the new financial infrastructure, the blockchain, which is global, instant, and free,” he said. “If you can move money today within three seconds, why do the majority of the world have to take three days and wait for their banks to move it?”

Sami Start, co-founder and chief executive of the on-ramp provider Transak, describes the same shift from the inside, and agrees the bank is becoming invisible. “Financial applications are embracing blockchain technology and stable coins in order to make better apps for users,” he said on the podcast. “The users may not necessarily see that on the surface, but it’s the rails that’s powering it underneath. We’re seeing that across wallets and neobanking, where wallets start to look like banks and banks start to look more like wallets.”

Often the customer has no idea a stablecoin is involved at all. “It’s the application that’s using it as a rails,” Start said. “In a lot of cases, the user might not even know that the stablecoin is there.”

That plumbing is no longer a crypto curiosity. The stablecoin market has pushed past $300 billion. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for the stablecoin firm Bridge. Mastercard, Fiserv and PayPal have each launched or wired in their own dollar tokens, and banks are now targeting the market too. The “every company gets a stablecoin” world Collins describes is, in pieces, already here.

The invisible bank is partly built

At enterprise scale, Collins’s future is closer to a present tense. Clara Shi runs WorldFirst, the cross-border payments arm of Ant International, which serves more than a million businesses, and she sells banking the way Collins describes it disappearing: as modular infrastructure a company snaps on without seeing the machinery. “It’s like a Lego game. Get whatever you need,” Shi said on the podcast. Behind a single account, she said, sits “the instant cross-border funds movement entirely embedded. They don’t need to understand what is a cross currency pooling, what is the sweeping, the FX. Let them feel it’s just one account.”

Consumers are drifting the same way. Alvin Kan, chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, said on the podcast that his users have stopped asking about crypto. “They don’t want to hear so much about the term crypto, they want to hear about use cases about how they can use the stablecoins,” he said. They now treat the balance, in his words, “more like a… dollar account rather than a trading wallet.”

Sports teams, AI agents and the death of the brand

Where Collins gets speculative is who issues the money next. He thinks it stops being governments and banks and becomes whoever you already follow. “What’s an ecosystem? A sports team, large gaming universes, cities, states, countries, large institutions, Amazon,” he said. “They’re gonna issue their own currencies because both the company itself gets more value and the users get more value.”

The routing, he argues, gets handed to software. “Your agents are going to route all of these transactions to whatever’s the most quickest and most profitable for you,” he said. Today, banks and Amazon largely block AI agents from touching customer money, a wall his model assumes comes down. After that, he thinks loyalty is the only thing left to fight over. “You’re gonna tell your AI, I wanna do all these transactions, but I want the maximum amount of rewards from soccer teams,” he said. “And so those soccer teams are gonna be the ones that reap the transactional value from your transactions and they’ll return it to you in the form of loyalty.”

Not everyone building the rails buys the agent part. Kan, who is building agent tools himself, is blunt about the hype. “A lot of people are like, the next wave of wallet users are going to be mainly AI agents. I’m like, no,” he said. “Every day we speak to users, and there’s so many out there who need stablecoins, and they’re getting on board.”

The yield regulators are trying to ban

STBL is where the thesis gets tested, and where it gets risky. Collins calls it “stablecoin 2.0,” and the hook is yield. “It strips that yield into two tokens. So you actually can still spend the stablecoin and earn the yield,” he said. “Something that’s never been able to be done before, because usually you have to stake it or hold on to it to earn the yield.”

In practice that means a dollar token, USST, whose interest accrues to a separate instrument backed partly by a tokenized Hamilton Lane private-credit fund. Collins puts the blended return at around five percent. Promotional accounts circling his ventures advertise far higher figures, up to 18 percent, numbers worth treating with caution.

The catch is regulatory. The GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, bars stablecoin issuers from paying interest to the people who hold their coins. STBL’s two-token split is designed to get around that. Regulators have caught on: in 2026 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed extending the ban to affiliates and third parties, with comments due in May. The design Collins is counting on lives in the gap.

He has little patience for rivals he sees as selling a token instead of a service. Asked whether STBL was another XRP-style promise that never arrives, he did not hedge. “What’s XRP? It’s just another centralized company, another brand. It’s not offering really a service. It’s saying, use my token,” he said. “What STBL is, it’s a decentralized protocol.”

“It’s a nice story”

The sharpest pushback comes from the people moving stablecoins for a living. Raj Kamal, co-founder and chief executive of the cross-border firm TransFi, said on the same podcast that the on-chain numbers everyone cites hide how far the real economy still is.

“It’s a nice story and everybody will quote on-chain transaction numbers, which are good, but they don’t solve real world issues for people,” Kamal said. The trouble is the last mile, where a stablecoin has to turn back into spendable local money. “If the sender’s mom who’s in the Philippines was able to just receive USDC or USDT and use that to buy grocery in a store, then there is no issue,” he said. “But that is not the world we live in.”

It gets harder away from the dollar. “When you begin to go into currencies outside of G3, especially in the currencies in emerging markets, liquidity begins to dry up,” Kamal said. Stablecoin volume, Start adds, is “pretty much just correlated by the GDP of that country,” so the rails may reach the rich long before the bottom billion.

Neo, who runs the Swiss-licensed crypto neobank UR, doubts the current wave proves anything. “Everyone’s taking the easy way out,” he said on the podcast. “Easy USDC stable coins, you issue a card, suddenly you’re NEO Bank and you can spend, and it’s very cool. But structurally at its core, nothing’s really changing.” What matters, he says, is rebuilding the account itself on-chain, so that “you don’t have to rely on a human or an institution to execute something that you want.”

Access, and its asterisk

One motivation runs under all of it. “The internet plugged in the whole world to knowledge. The blockchain plugs the whole world into financial access,” Collins said. WeFi, which he calls a “deobank,” is meant to be the plumbing that lets banks and apps run accounts on-chain, including in local currency. “Why does it need to say USDC when it can just say one dollar?” he asked. Reach the roughly 1.3 billion adults the World Bank counts without a bank account, he says, and “you raise up that bottom billion.”

The pitch tends to skip one thing: control. In April, Tether froze about $344 million in USDT tied to Iran, working with U.S. authorities. A dollar on someone else’s chain can still be seized. Asked whether crypto is being recentralized, Collins did not argue. “It absolutely is,” he said. He draws his line at government-issued coins, which he warns would turn money into “a surveillance state.” Decentralization still matters to him for a plainer reason. “Sometimes those governments fail and those currencies crash,” he said.

As for the banks themselves, Collins does not think they vanish so much as fade. “So banks will still be around, right? Branches won’t,” he said. “All those fees will be compressed.” Visa is building with him, and the operators wiring the same rails mostly think he has the direction right. They just keep returning to the last mile. Whether the bank becomes a utility in five years or twenty is the part no one on the rails agrees on yet.