Ryan Johnson-Hunt / How The USD Will Rule The World, With AI Ep 513

0:00the retrobated axiom of tyranny is under certain some qualifications, the only policy by which a republic can be administered on just principles. Thomas Jefferson said that and I have no idea what that means. We were so much smarter back then and I think dividing conquer is actually what's happening right now in the world. So allow me to be brief here. This is really important and there's literally zero incentive for me to tell you this for what it's worth. I was in Christchurch, New Zealand over this weekend. Unbelievably beautiful city and for me, even more beautiful people to hang out with made it better. Talking about freedom and choice and the future but I did see racism. I saw threats of violence. I saw rage at people in public spaces and I saw messages that I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't subscribe to themselves personally. I watched 20 minutes of public TV waiting for the plane on way way back home. What is going on?

1:04Dividing conquer politics, culture and media wars, it's been a hyper-dryer for six years now and it's starting to get obvious even if you're paying only a little bit of attention. If you haven't given thought as to where this all goes in the future, I very much encourage you to consider the risk of financial loss, the risk of losing your time or even the risk of losing your freedom unless we can be really honest around who really benefits from keeping us divided, discouraged and distracted. Now I know that there is not one of us that wouldn't strike first if there was someone out there threatening to kill you and that's normal, right? But these days it kind of feels old-fashioned and you could die for doing that. Let's just defend ourselves instead because then we're right, we didn't do anything wrong, we're not the aggressor, we're not the one taking over someone else. Let's just wait until the problem happens. Sound familiar? Zero apologies by the way for being blunt here because if you benefit from this little message before this podcast episode

2:07even in a small way, it'll be absolutely worth my expense for your benefit. But if you don't learn how to keep even a small amount of wealth digital, things might not go very well in the future when the world is 100% digital. So where is your wealth right now? And how confident are you, I guess, in your ability to actually use that wealth in the future? Will it be there? Will you be there with it? And will there be things in the way of you getting at it? And who will have the ability to take it from you? Let's say the government ran out of money. Who knows, crazy or things have happened, right? Well where are they going to get it from? Sure, they can print it using the monetary lever, using central banks. That's kind of what they've done so far. Most people don't notice, usually works pretty good. But let's say they decide to get a little bit more grabby in the tax department. And let's say you happen to have a decent sized investment account, a QVSaver account, a property portfolio or even just a home. Let's say you have wealth and no one else does. How does that work when literally everybody expects you to give it away? I guess it's

3:13hard for all of us because we have to consider a world that really feels quite different for the world that we've seen in the past. So way easier just not to think about it, right? Is that a really safe strategy though? I don't want to be morally superior by saying this. I'm not. It's intellectual laziness. And is this laziness at the very least that puts us at risk from future forms of AI and financial infrastructure that will exploit us? Tools that know more about you and I then we do. Tools that can impersonate us, manipulate our family and separate us from our wealth long before any of those 99% unrealized capital gains tax ever shows up on a policy paper. I don't think AI is just going to be the new asset class for us to invest in. I think it will be the rails sort of via digital dollars and or stable coins. If you like being controlled by another nation state, if you like the idea that and that's great, which one would you choose? Do you want to choose the one

4:19that maybe is a little bit different to how you grew up or do you want to use the one that maybe you watched on TV but you hate for reasons that you just don't like the actors in the movie. Either way, if you start using the money from one country, you effectively are subscribing to the control of that country. We have trillions of dollars worth of wealth already sitting in US dollar denominated stable coins. In this one though, I'm not talking about Bitcoin believe or not, which is actually quite fascinating because really, where would you want that money to sit if you wanted to have absolute control over it? New Zealand dollars? US dollars? Have fun with that. It doesn't really matter how much of it you own when no one's using it anymore. Where does your wealth go? But why should you care before your force to? AI induced mass unemployment with technology that will possibly pretty soon have human rights in the same way we do. Who's preparing

5:22for that? Certainly not our governments. Now Ryan Johnson Hunt is here as someone building in a new regime money. Not just commenting from the sidelines. I've known Ryan for a few years now. I've caught up with him a couple of times in the podcast and I know how he works in business and so I do hope you enjoy this one. There is one thing I need from you though before we get started and that is your help giving me five star review on Spotify or wherever you're listening to me from. When you talk about things that maybe aren't popular, you get a lot of negativity in terms of reviews. Not just because, you know, I'm still learning how to do this properly, I guess, but just because people don't like what they're hearing. But I can't just stop and not talk about what I think is right just because it might be unpopular. So if you haven't already done so I just really appreciate it. If you could help me to offset a lot of that negativity that I get just for bringing you this. Let's make a start. Hope you enjoy.

6:22The Everyday Investor Podcast, a podcast about building new wealth for the new world. I'm Darcy Ungarro, a qualified financial advisor and your host. Join me as I tackle some of the practical investing topics and the big picture stuff too, including strategies across shares, property, precious metals, Bitcoin and more. This podcast is partially funded by the generous support of our show partners, special thanks to Pervincia, specializing in wholesale access to industrial commercial property funds and management services. My rent, see why residential property investors all over New Zealand are switching to MyRent.co.nz. And lastly, Swiftex, with over 1 million customers across New Zealand and Australia, ask yourself, where can crypto take you? The views and opinions expressed on the following episode is not meant to be interpreted as financial advice. If you need that, though, click on the free 15-minute link in the show notes, reach out for some advice. With all that said, let's make a start.

7:26What is a stablecoin? Normally, when we talk about tokens and digital tokens and crypto, there's the technology, but then there's also the volatility of speculation of the asset. So a stablecoin is trying to get the best of both worlds where the token itself runs on those same technology rails, so it's fast and cheap, but the ownership of that token represents a real dollar held somewhere by someone that's trusted and regulated. And so the idea is that that token is kind of pegs that's value to that stable asset, like a dollar. So if you were thinking about this from an investment point of view, we're not necessarily looking at this as another digital asset that we want to hold, hoping number go up. Yeah, exactly,

8:28it would be a tool to be able to go in and out of digital assets without having to then convert to dollars and back again. Sure, it's just got like a bolt-on cash management account. Exactly. In your digital wallet. Exactly. So if someone had a whole lot of crypto and they were convinced that the market was going to drop, they might very quickly and easily swap all of that to a stablecoin and with the belief that that will stay at the value of a dollar. Okay. So if we were to think about our dollars in our bank right now, that bank effectively is a custodian of this fiat or government money that sits inside of the account that they manage. Whereas with the stablecoin, how does that work? Like, if I have, say, $10,000 worth of USD C or USDT, what does that actually mean? And where is it? The important difference is that being the token, you've got a lot more control over it, especially if you self-carset it in your own wallet

9:30and if you're already involved in a crypto, you probably already have that set up. And so apart from counter-terrorism financing and other major things like that, those assets can't be kind of frozen or controlled. They're definitely yours. So you've got the freedom to do with those, what you how you want. Now, obviously banking has a really important part to play in our society, but people might get nervous about the fact that there's been situations overseas where you say the wrong thing on social media and your banker gets get frozen or they might be concerned about fractional banking and not actually being able to get those dollars back if they want them. But I think for most people, generally, they look at stable coins as a digital cash type of solution where they can send and pay overseas quickly and easily as opposed to like a philosophical decision. Right. But just going back to that, like, if I was a Canadian drugger, which, you know, one of those two things are true, then, and if I said something I shouldn't have or supported

10:33a cause, I shouldn't have according to the government of the day and I had a whole bunch of USDC in my digital wallet, you mentioned that with AML violations or counter-financing of terrorism type thing, like how can they actually stop me from transacting in my stable coins in my own digital wallet? Gotcha. And this is probably a good way to talk about self-custody versus through a platform. So let's say the stable coin was held by a custodial platform like Coinbase or any number of other phintics exchanges. They could get a directive from local law enforcement or whatever and those assets could be potentially frozen, right? That's one of the trade-offs for the convenience of that versus self-custody. But when we're talking about freezing those assets, that is usually a very, very, very high standard and it's

11:33into Paul or something like that going to the stable coin issuer and saying, hey, we're going to freeze those tokens on the blockchain as opposed to a wallet, which is only done very, very rarely, and it's for trafficking of kids and stuff like that as opposed to posting something on social media. Right. But if I was self-custoding those stable coins on my own wallet, does that afford me any greater degree of freedom in terms of my choice? 100% almost, almost complete freedom. And so you can think of, like let's say another example of like CBDC, which we've talked a lot about before, central bank kind of digital currency, that you could think of it as being potentially like a stable coin, but with the surveillance and control directly from the government. Now there are lots of models that don't have that, but that is the concern people have. And so if the whole idea is, oh, but we need to have digital cash to interact with the digital economy, the private

12:35stable coins are already filling that gap pretty aggressively globally. And so when you hold a stable coin, the issuer has to have a dollar there, right? Yeah. And just talking me through like the little bit of history in terms of stable coins and how you could get a different things that back that dollar. But what is the, I guess, standard going forward in terms of what we'll generally always back the stable coin? Yeah, there's been experiments with algorithmic stable coins where there's some kind of complicated maths. Yeah, that's typically always entities because people try and manipulate it. There are still some very good kind of crypto backed stable coins, where it's backed by a mixture of crypto Bitcoin things like that. They've always stuck around, but by far the most common model going forward is having one to one backed with cash and cash equivalents that are regulated or kind of controlled to have that trust that trust layer.

13:39At the moment, different jurisdictions have a different take on what that licensing should look like. So the US has gone down a licensing route with the genius eight, which we can talk about soon. Other regions, New Zealand as an example, have taken a more of an agnostic look where there's no special licensing for stable coins, but it's more, you know, the token is a claim on those dollars that are held in a beer trust with a bank. So there's that kind of legal protection there. Most stable coins, including our two, there's no ability for every day retail holders to then come back to us to swap the token for a dollar and back again, because there's so much anti-money laundering risk and surface area there. So what we do is we have a smaller number of highly trusted, highly vetted wholesale counterbodies that have very robust anti-money laundering kind of policies,

14:40and they are our trusted counter parties that can turn dollars, swap dollars for tokens and tokens for dollars, and they were their users and then kind of goes out into the wild and circulates. But their needs to always be trust in the market that if they needed to, those tokens could come back and be exchanged for dollars at a hundred cents on the dollar, when there's that trust isn't there or when it's broken, that's one thing to downhill really, really quickly. Okay, because I guess there's trust in the institutional framework behind it, yeah, and then there's trust in the actual underlying asset that's, yeah, and then the technology, but the asset behind it, right? So if it was US dollars or even short-term treasuries, for example, dollar-like substitutes, that's very different to complicated algorithms and exactly like OS apps that fluctuate in problem manipulation. Exactly. So if the underlying asset everyone's confident that they could sell it in under a day and get it back into dollars,

15:43then generally everyone's pretty happy. Okay, and that's what short-term treasuries would do. So July ish last year, we saw the Genius Act pass into law. It was genius. I can't remember what it stands for, but maybe you could help me understand what does it mean? Like what does it actually do? Why why should every country kind of go through that in some degree? I guess it's a minor line question too. Yeah, of course. I think the biggest impact it had was just tell the whole world that stablecoins are legitimate. They're not going anywhere and that US is embracing them as part of their kind of economic plan, which is an amazing green traffic light for stablecoins around the world. It also had a kind of two-pronged strategic approach for the US, which was very beneficial. One, it repatriated all those issues that had moved overseas because of the lack of regulation. So it's like, come back to America. We'll give you a really good framework to do it. You can bring back your corporate tax and your jobs and things as well, which is great.

16:47But really, really, really cleverly, it allows a large proportion of those reserves, those dollars that are held to be held in US short-term treasury debt. So they were able to manufacture this whole other very sticky demand market to buy and hold US debt at a time where geopolitically, sometimes other countries are less excited about holding US debt. So very, very good move by them. Partly because of that, we have a market that is 99 percent of stablecoins, a US dollar denominated. It's a huge industry, you know, 300 billion at the moment is kind of the value of all the stablecoins in circulation. And volume, even when you clean out the rhythmic trading and bots and things like that, it's still about 9 trillion a year in volume, which is several times bigger than PayPal. So it is a real thing. It's not going away.

17:48What I'm really passionate about is the idea of regions and non-USD stablecoins picking up their game to compete and interact with that economy. And, you know, not only to be able kind of really good products and services for people that live outside the US, but also for their nation's monetary sovereignty as well. Okay, so I want to come back to that phrase monetary sovereignty in a second. But just going back to like the genius of all this, right? Yeah. It's creating demand for US debt, which is happening during a time where central banks in particular have been allocating more towards gold than they have to treasuries as their reserve assets. For potentially some good reason, right? They've seen what happened to Russia, perhaps that was a bit of a clue as to what they should do. But it really feels quite interesting because if you think about this, the petro dollar sort of arrangement that was arrived at in the 70s where there was demand for US dollars because that was what would be traded for oil.

18:53Now it's like they've re-engineered that, reinvented that for the digital age and saying, right, well, if you want stable coins, 99% of the market is ours, US dollar, but it's a fascinating bit of game theory and it kind of makes me think that US dollar dominance isn't yet dead. In your view, do you think that this was about creating demand for US debt or was this really genuinely just about being the leaders of innovation? I think there's no doubt that the debt piece was a huge factor. And at the moment, you talk about central banks, maybe not wanting to hold US debt. Of course, there's the pattern we've seen about freezing and controlling assets, but also the fact that essentially it's a way of exporting US inflation because the other reserve currency, right? And then you look at the US, you look at their kind of debt, you look to a future where inflation is probably something that can continue to be a challenge for them.

19:57Maybe those countries don't want to be the place where that inflation is exported to. And at the moment, the status quo is with stable coins, that's exactly what's going to happen. Unless you get non-USD stable coins rising up to meet the occasion. Sure. Then they're effectively at first mover advantage, right? Where it's going to be really hard to compete with the likes of circle and tether to kind of get to that game. And therefore, we're going to be in a way price takers, literally inflation takers. Unless we do something and each sovereign nation protect their own monetary sovereignty by creating their own digital stable coin. If we take an example of that, New Zealanders like many other non-USD countries where developed countries where we have good monetary policy or got inflation basically under control for the most part. And the reserve bank is always looking at how can we

21:02preserve that monetary sovereignty in the future where Kiwis and non-USD countries just by default use US dollar stable coin, that's actually a real big problem for monetary sovereignty, right? So there's the economic incentive for people and businesses to be able to engage in digital markets with their own currency, just for convenience. Then there's also the monetary sovereignty piece at a nation state level where you want those tokens to be backed by the local currency. It's an interesting thing because even amidst an OCR announcement, potentially as we speak in New Zealand where the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is exerting its influence over the New Zealand economy by setting the price of money, it's a price control. There is an increasingly the suspicion that there's little regard for the local economy and it's much more orchestrated internationally now via the BIS, for example. And probably about even just six months ago, that sounded

22:06conspiratorial, but now it kind of sounds like, well, that's probably how things work. And with stable coins, I guess that's kind of, especially if it's dominated by the US, that's going to become more and more obvious that we're really just going along and riding on the cocktails of whatever the dominant currency is if he controls the money controls the world. So I know the Reserve Bank of New Zealand was quite keen on this whole central bank digital currency thing kind of feels like they've stepped off, which is kind of encouraging to see considering some of the concerns that were aired at the time. But this is obviously going to be quite critical that they step up to it. Personally, I don't see a lot of initiative coming out of the Reserve Bank to kind of license stable coin issuers. You're in the industry though. How have they been? Have they been quite receptive like when you're dealing with regulators or quite keen? New Zealand regulators are very receptive. It's one of the awesome things about innovating in New Zealand. The access to regulators and their general openness to

23:14innovative solutions is fantastic. I think it's likely, and it's kind of our piece, is that at some point in the future, most developed countries will form some kind of stable coin licensing regime. The US one is obviously standard. You've got Europe and Micah, which is a little bit more kind of controlling. And yet to be seen where Australia will go, there's some movement there, but everyone's at a holding pattern until the dust settles on that. So when you look at the Reserve Banks of New Zealand's goal to have digital currency, monetary sovereignty and economic global economic opportunities, then a private stable coin that has guardrails to protect consumers kind of ticks all those things quite nicely without having the risk or the future risk of that kind of control and surveillance state that

24:15everyone gets nervous about with CBDCs. Now thinking a little bit about the banking industry a little bit like here in New Zealand, we had a little bit of progress happening on the open banking space. And some fintechs will be taking full advantage of that, and we'll probably going to see a whole slew of different offerings coming out soon, tracking your money, and different payment service providers. And that's pretty cool to see that sort of stuff. With stable coins, how does that change the game? Does it make it kind of like a bad investment to worry about open banking? Like was that all a waste of time when you could kind of just build an offering that's built around stable coins? No, I think that very, very complimentary open banking is making the existing rails work so much better. And so apart from making sure the messaging is right, this trust structure is remain, right? So that's a great early step for so many use cases. So no problems there at all.

25:16Stable coins are almost like a completely different operating system. It's removing, you know, if we think about traditional finance, you've got all these siloed parts to play, and it all kind of works, but it's all kind of clunky, a lot of handshakes, a lot of handshakes, and a lot of kind of clipping of tickets and friction and things like that. But it works, and it's safe, and everyone believes in it. So that's a good thing. Stable coins and digital finance, the entire operating system starts from scratch. So you've got assets and money on the same ledger. So you've got, you know, tokenized assets or digital currencies, whatever, and stable coins on the same operating system. They can settle instantly, atomically. So it's a huge change. So that's always going to be slower to get adopted, and it will typically be around the edges where even with open banking, there's still frictions,

26:17like cross-border settlement, multi-currency, things like that. So that's where stable coins can step in and solve some problems, and that's the only way new technology is really adopted, is it's got to solve problems in order of magnitude better than what the status quo is. Right. I could be out of place here just by saying this, but I think most people in the financial services industry would still look at that term, stable coin, and immediately think, crypto, yeah, dangerous, teraluna, scam, yep, sandbankment, freed, I'm running. Yeah. Why is that not true, though? Like why is it okay? Why is it safe to kind of innovate and think openly about stable coins now, especially if you're in the fintech space? Yeah, I think like most things, and I've made the mistake many times in my career, is trying to push and like evangelize technology change, and that only gets you so far. So it's really about determining where the

27:21really sticky pain points are that at the moment exists, and then offering the solution for that. Because people don't change their behavior because of a philosophy, they change it because of it saves them dollars or time. And so, you know, if you, when you look at a stable coin, you've got kind of two elements of trust as the technology work, well, we haven't had, you know, that overall, the cryptography around tokens has stood the test of time. It's really been about the volatility and speculation behind it. So if you can trust the issuer, trust that they regulated, trust that there is the appropriate reserve backing, then that allows you to then use those dollars out in the wild world as if it was a real dollar. And then you can start and enables maybe smaller, maybe more agile QE businesses to start to kind of compete on the global stage.

28:28Because at the moment, if they try to do that and they accept USD, USD stable coins, that's great, but then how do they actually get that into a medium where they can pay their lease, pay their bills? They need to then get that into New Zealand dollars. So without a good supply and a good liquidity with local USD, non-USD currencies, really regional entities are still priced out, that kind of excluded from those markets because of the system behind Holt and Beck. So could you then say just going back to the domination of the stable coin market by US dollar denominated stable coins? Is it true to say then that different countries around the world? It actually is in the best interest of the US to make sure that other countries develop their own stable coins as well so that you have that kind of infrastructure that's being built out in those local economies that create that demand. I think US will probably be quite happy if everyone

29:32has used the USD stable coins. Of course, yeah. So it's only a best interest to perpetuate that. Right. It's in the best interest of the nation states, the individual consumers, and even more importantly, the corporations that are trying to compete globally to have a viable local alternative. Interesting. I think we sometimes kind of separate that the money in the state, almost too much without realizing that actually, if you really do control the money, you really do control the world, therefore if you don't have sovereignty over your money, you don't really have sovereignty over your nation. And so it is kind of like in a weird way, it's like a national security thing, isn't it? Yeah, you could say that. And then we already see some countries that have been really proactive in this. An example would be Nigeria. They've got their E-Nyra. It's essentially a stable coin. And it's got a huge uptake. And so the actual use of USD stable coins in Nigeria is much lower than other African countries because they have a good local alternative.

30:37Right. So the playbook is there. It's just about whether that's something that is driven from the government point of view, or whether it is done by private corporations, or a mix of two, maybe it's encouraged by government level, but driven by a competitive private sector. Sure. So at new money then, you've launched, right? So, but you don't have a licensing regime that you're operating within. No, New Zealand doesn't have one. So you don't need to abide by something that doesn't exist. No, we've got a legal framework, which we abide by anti-money laundering and a compliance program. That's a lot easier and manageable because we only deal with wholesale trusted counterparties for swapping dollars, the tokens and advice versa. We don't have direct interaction with people with the public that want to swap because that's just a whole other money laundering surface area and risk. Yeah. But yeah, no, so we're live with the New Zealand

31:37dollar stablecoin, which is called DNZD and the Australian one, which is DAUD. And yeah, so we're just going through the process of now building up the market making and the exchangeless things that are now allow the distribution of those. We're really interested in helping Kiwi and Aussie companies compete globally in digital finance with its payments, with mittens, whatever, forex. Yeah, forex would be a massive one. Yeah, and forex one is really interesting because the only like let's say a Kiwi business or an Aussie business or any regional if they want to accept US dollars for payment, that's fine because you know that you can swap US dollars to New Zealand dollars at any bank, very, very tight spreads. So we just need to try and replicate and bring that to the digital money. And so that people can accept US dollar stablecoins fine. They know that they can swap that to a local currency whenever they need to and then back to the actual dollar with the issue if they need to as well. That's that kind of velocity is how

32:44really if we're going to make 2026 the year the rise of the non-NUSD stablecoin, that's what needs to take place. Right. So as a stablecoin issue or what is the revenue model? Are you taking your revenue comes from spreads or does it come from a mixture of spreads and just clipping the ticket on the reserves? At the moment we actually don't have any mint and redeem fees with our wholesale counterbodies. All we do is the reserves that are held on trust, the interest from that, we keep that. And I guess the fact that you're not passing on any yield to token holders, you know real threat to the banks right now, are you? No, there's no, we're not competing for kind of deposit taking. And that was a big part of the genius act in the US really is that a prohibited stablecoin issues from issuing a yield. Now there are lots of ways for people with stablecoins, including

33:47to be able to go to third parties and generate. Sometimes they're quite a competitive yield. Like everything else in capital markets, the more the yields, the more the risk. So you know, do your own research as to how that yield is generated. There's no magic way to make yield. It needs to be made somehow. But by stablecoin issue is not being going to pass that on. Some would have a view that that was the US banking interests kind of protecting that deposit taking function for the banks. And that might be true. There might be also some other structural reasons why it's good to keep those with banks. I'm not a expert on the US. Right. Even just from like logistically, how you would do that, if you had these one-to-one reserves and that money was held in some sort of bonds, short-term bonds, you were getting yield off that as the issuer. How would you transmit that yield to the holder of the token? Would you kind of like do air drops? Yeah, there's a few different kind of models to do it. Sometimes it can be, I've seen models where you kind of lock up or stake

34:54some of your stablecoin. And then the rewards go to that group. Others have like a rebasing model, which is basically you, of course, you don't want to increase the value of the token. Otherwise, it's not a dollar, right? But it might be that you hold a hundred dollars of stablecoin. And then at the end of the year, you might look at, oh, you've got magically a hundred ten dollars in your wallet. So you can do that role as well. That I think the future where lots of stablecoins are yield-bearing is probably not one that's going to happen any time soon, that'll be the last, that's the end of banks to hang on to. And then there might be good reasons. It doesn't really matter because there are more and more lower risk ways for people to choose your own adventure and get a yield in a few ways. So we've seen JP Morgan coin seems to be there's bank interests that are slowing things down already. And is that primarily because the banks really don't want to let go

35:56of this cash cow, which is holding all these deposits and paying patents? Yeah, is there any going to be a factor? The other thing is with JP Morgan in particular, a class of example of look at what people are doing, not looking what they say, years and years of anti-crypto sentiment, and then in the background forming teams to build it out. So there's probably a mix, if I was to speculate, trying to protect this status quo, but also get ahead of the new world and get market share in there as well. Got it? Okay. AI agents. Yes. So it seems increasingly like it's not going to be about businesses or even people that are out there doing stuff, holding money and earning money. It could just be these autonomous AI agents that are out there making little micro gains every now and then and storing them in Bitcoin maybe and then using thousand different types of currencies to transact in all over the world doing whatever they do. Where does this go with stablecoins? Do you see that these AI agents will create a significant

37:03demand for stablecoins? Oh, no doubt. I mean, we talked before about a single operating system. Well, now you've got intelligence and literal agents, literal code that would do what a hedge manager would do. And if they're able to get data and use money digitally, I mean, the world is always still right. So there's all kinds of interesting things there. From replicating what happens off chain now to entirely new things we haven't even thought about yet. In itself, agents don't necessarily expand the non-USD component. A USD coin could probably function if you're doing trading, probably even better in some ways. What I'm excited about kind of agentic trading is arbitraging the forex markets because the forex markets huge, deep, daily volume very, very well established if the premise is that a stablecoin and this list of trusted

38:08stablecoins are backed one to one. At the moment, we have spreads and volatility still tight, but nowhere near as tight as off chain forex. So there is the opportunity for people to use bots to arbitrage differences in the exchange rate between digital and non-digital. It breaks everything down into smaller units in a way, right? Like that opportunity shrinks tiny, but it moves so much faster. And you're creating, I guess you're creating better liquidity because you're speeding up the velocity of money that's moving through the system. I'm sure there's some downside risks there. If you put your doomer lens on, I'm sure that's pretty scary thinking about these autonomous agents that are out there. Potentially paying people to do stuff. Potentially. But I can also see that it's probably easier to regulate code than it is to regulate humans in terms of actually controlling their behavior. That's definitely part of it. I don't know about the regulation piece, but just a practical piece. The alternative is that bots will use what

39:13credit card payments, right? Or you give it access to your bank account, probably pretty bad ideas. The credit one, just because you're losing so much in the spreads with the transaction fees. So let's say you develop this new agent, you're like, yeah, this is pretty cool. I'll put $10 of stablecoin in this wallet. You can never go negative in that. You know, you can just do margin or something really creative. We really hard to go negative in that. And it's a wallet, right? It's not attached to a person. So I'm not actually sure how you could go negative. You could just abandon the wallet. So as again, looking at stablecoins, instead of being a product in itself, wow, a shiny stablecoin. It's like, cool, there's a digital money. What cool stuff can we do with it? The ecosystem that starts to evolve around it that is able to think to watch not necessarily the boring thing. Exactly. Just water, right? Yeah, but it's the ecosystem that it supports. And so what an ideal outcome, I think, for stablecoins

40:16in general and more specifically non-USD ones, is that maybe a couple of years from now, someone like my mum, who has no interest in crypto, might open up her new wallet on Facebook or whatever it is. And there's dollars there and she's buying and spending and buying gifts and sending money overseas. And behind that, it's actually stablecoins that are doing the cool stuff, but it's all abstracted away to make it really simple and easy. That would be the ideal situation. Because we don't want to try. We're looking underneath the bonnet here, right? There's so much technical stuff going on here. We're having this conversation. People don't really need to understand it because it's not really, you don't need to know this. Compression, audio, compression formats. We're kids. We're having a conversation. People can hear it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. With new money, tell me about the roadmap. What's next on the horizon? What's your biggest pain point? What are you excited about in terms of your next milestone?

41:19Our biggest, well, our initial friction was getting the banking and all the legal frameworks set up. It's always tough to be on the fringe of what's happening because you're pushing the envelope. So, likely we've got smart people around us that have got us at this point. Issuing the stablecoins was kind of that milestone. Now, the next thing is, of course, you're going to accompany who might want to use them. They want to ask, how easy it for me to get from your stablecoin to a US dollar one. What is that liquidity like? And so, that is forced us to find a very good, reputable market maker, who I won't name, but where I'm going through the process of getting both of our stablecoins supported by them. So, that will be deep liquidity options for people to use. And then that unlocks, exchangeless things, other kind of corporate institutional use cases that solving those problems of moving money, cross-border and things like that. I would love to see

42:22a day 12, 24 months from now where generally every day people are using it in their life to buy stuff and to send money. And they could do that now, but it needs to become more embedded into easier user interfaces. At the moment, if someone's a crypto enthusiast and they wanted to do that, they can and people do do that. But if we come back to my mum as a target demographic, how would she use stablecoin? What it needs to be super simple, super easy, and it just needs to work. One of the ones that caught my eye the other day, it's an overseas company, but they're looking at payroll solutions with stablecoin because suddenly, instead of doing payroll once, if you're two weeks or once every month, it could be done theoretically every day, every hour, really. And it could be automated so much more than payroll often is,

43:24cross-border, instantly, great for people with global teams. So, that's just a very, very small example of what digital money unlocks. We should be really obvious in the future when we look back at this. I just did a trade on trade-me recently. I sold something on trade-me and the buyer didn't go through partly because there was a big gap between when the trade was initiated and when settlement actually occurred or in this case didn't occur. If it was all instantaneous, no problem whatsoever, right? So, in a situation where you were buying a car of someone, you're even buying a house for that matter, how could stablecoins and other types of technology, specifically smart contracts? How could that make that whole process of exchanging funds for large items go really smoothly? So, whether you're talking about an auction or you're talking about a big trade deal with millions of dollars or it's staged, it's staged, kind of contract, you know,

44:26freelancing things like that, because you've got this single ledger that can hold the money and kind of escrow those funds in a smart contract. You could very quite simply actually have an auction platform where before you actually sighed to say, yep, I'm going to be, I'm going to accept it, you have to have those funds locked and escrow and then, you know, the one is a blockchain and a ton of excitement either both sides happen or no sides happen. So, you've got no chance where you send the money then don't get what you want, it can happen atomically. So, that's another example of how that could work and that's where I see lots of opportunities with trade at the moment that happens to trust accounts with the Swift network. So, it could be stablecoins with a smart contract, but it could just be the same trust structures, but just the money gets sent

45:29in a second instead of, you know, 24, you know, how many hours it takes all of the weekend and stuff like that. Okay. Property. What can you tell me about where things are at with tokenization of real estate? Yeah. And how does, and maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but how does stablecoins perhaps help in that transaction? So, there's kind of two really cool opportunities for stablecoins with tokenized assets, whether it's property, tokenized equities, whatever, by having the asset and the money on the same ledger, it means you can settle instantly and atomically. So, you know, so when you say it's on the same ledger, like say with property, for example, the title itself will be tokenized and put on that ledger next to the money itself used to trade those things together, right? Exactly. So, whether it's title backed tokens, which are kind of the newest evolution, whether they are just kind of more traditional tokenized equity in a company that holds the, no

46:32matter what the underlying asset is, or the legal structure of it, the fact that it's would present as a token means it can move at the same speed that stablecoins can. So, you've got really clean settlement, right? So, that's the first one. The second one is if you've got any yield bearing component to the assets. So, for title backed tokens, for example, which, you know, we also work on under the title, kind of umbrella, you've got the how do you share rent share, proportionate to how much of the title that person holds? Well, that's where we're using the great utility for our stablecoin, right? So, we can distribute, you know, if there's a big commercial building and it's broken into how many, you know, title backed tokens, the proportion of that net revenue each month can be distributed to token holders and it's just there and there, and there wallet. So, that means two things, super, super clean, easy. It makes the title backed

47:36token more valuable because it's getting really clean, fast revenue coming in. That's got the provenance of blockchain, you can see the transparency of how it happened. It also means that the efficiencies of scale go all the way down to basically arbitrary. There's no difference in terms of fees or speed, whether you're sending a dollar stablecoin or a billion dollars in stablecoin. There is no difference in speed or fees, which is going to be such, it's going to be so disruptive to so many industries in property in particular, right? I can think of mortgages. I can think of like real estate agents, lawyers to a certain extent. A lot of them are going to be disintermediated with this because it's all going to be settled atomically and there's no sliding revenue based on the value of the underlying asset that's trading hands, right? Yeah, and if we look to history,

48:38there will be some lawyers, some real estate developers that get on early, they've got the trust factor. People where emotional creatures we like to trust someone, we want to have a real person, we can go knock on the door, something goes wrong. It'll be the early adopters of that technology that do the market share rather than an abstract faceless protocol that I'm not going to trust my house to some faceless thing. If it's a company that already know and trust and they are able to offer me a product or service that's better, faster, cheaper, that's where the economic value is going. You can totally see AI agents replacing real estate agents as well, right? We're instead of you're actually putting it to an external person and they're trying to reach whoever the buyers are out there and the ether, you have this agent who's actively and proactively reaching people who are in the market for that exact property, but instead of just selling that asset, they're actually completing the settlement and organizing everything,

49:39right? The title and all that sort of stuff. It might be that the full settlement always ends up in traditional rails because you do it once a decade and it's a couple million dollars, but then what about all those other layers of services and products and things like that, that can be arbitraged, that's an interesting one. Yeah, it is. Okay, where can people go to learn more about new money or DNZD, D-A-U-D? This way is to go to our website www.getnew.money. Get new.money. Yeah, that's good. Thank you very much, Ryan Johnson Hunt for coming on the podcast. Again, we appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, that's it.

52:21But that ain't worked well with me. I'm scared how they're going to help. When life ain't what it's supposed to be. Everybody got an opinion about a war they never seen. Everybody got an opinion about a war they never seen. Two visitors and imprases. See who's pulling on the machine. They talking loud and proud. Now, the things they never knew. Cue combat's proud of life, but the love below they never knew.

53:28Even from a paper script. Like the words all about and true. We looking for the right time. Not the true bad, good, down, deep. We working for the right. And broken, devil, broad daylight. Feeling rich in our own minds. While our pockets fall asleep. Lazy and I thinkin'

54:31Lazy and her workin' blame. Lazy and I thinkin' Red wine cause no one prays. Ain't counting where the money goes. I just hopein' it gonna stay. There's a new kind of devil. Know my face and my mama's name. There's a new kind of devil. The reprobated axiom of tyranny. Talk sweet like my whole reflection. But it don't ever feel no shame. It can talk just like my baby. Write my hand and steal my sand. It can talk just like my baby.

55:34Write my hand and sense my slip between my good intentions. Till my last phone niggling my eye. Ain't got a full no pistol. Ain't got a bus down my back door. Ain't got a full no pistol. Ain't got a bus down my back door. Jazz and whisper's good wires. Leave me busted on the floor. I ain't feelin' no crash now.

56:35I don't see no bones and busts. I ain't feelin' no crash now. I ain't see no bones and busts. I'm feelin' how a fool man. Sign is so. We're blind in trust. So I'm havin' me a dollar. Where the paper eyes can't see. So I'm havin' me a dollar. On the bottom of the beep blue zeep. Cause the heart is workin' prison. Is the one callin' itself free? Ain't choirin' minds just found out your own turn around. When that big script startled.

57:35And the crowd don't know their lines. When that big script startled over. And the crowd don't know their lines. I'll be walkin' snowin' quiet. Hotlin' was still truly mine. Now a coyote porch slick tree. Green apple to mild. Easy. Full solid.