<\/p>\n
Conversations about stablecoins have a way of turning into conversations about technology. Which chain, which standard, whose rail. When PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster sat down with Tassat<\/a> CEO Glen Sussman<\/a> for the \u201cMonday Conversation\u201d series, she put a plainer question on the table. \u201cHow many rails do we need?\u201d<\/p>\n The real answer is probably fewer than are currently under construction, and Sussman didn\u2019t argue the point. What he offered instead was this. The question, fair as it is, aims at the wrong target. Counting rails is a technology exercise. The thing actually being contested is older, duller and a good deal more consequential.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the deposit.<\/p>\n Sussman has watched the mood inside banks swing hard enough to give a person whiplash.<\/p>\n \u201cFor two or three years, you literally couldn\u2019t mention the word blockchain inside of a bank without getting thwacked in the head,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd now all of a sudden, everybody\u2019s getting thwacked in the head for not having a digital-asset strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n That reversal, from career risk to career requirement in roughly 24 months, he said explains a great deal about the current landscape, including its least flattering features. Banks, payments networks, core providers and crypto-native firms are all standing up tokenized-deposit systems and stablecoin infrastructure at a velocity that has begun to look less like conviction and more like insurance. Nobody wants to be the institution that has to explain to a board why it did nothing.<\/p>\n Sussman is direct about what that produces. Outside the largest global institutions, he said, he sees very little genuine commitment to any single model. What he sees is \u201ca lot of optionality preservation.\u201d Pilots joined, expertise accumulated, bets hedged, nothing irreversible.<\/p>\n He\u2019s careful not to criticize. He\u2019s lived the alternative. Tassat ran blockchain-based settlement platforms for Signature Bank and Customers Bank, which means Sussman knows firsthand what it takes to hold a real-time environment open around the clock while keeping it synchronized with core systems designed in a different century.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople underestimate the work that it takes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Which brings the strategy question back into focus. A tokenized deposit network with no users is not a strategy. Neither is stablecoin connectivity that reproduces, at considerable expense, a service a larger competitor already offers. Sussman\u2019s counsel to banks is to experiment in a \u201clight touch and opportunistic way\u201d and to stay ruthless about what sits on the other side of the investment.<\/p>\n \u201cBanks need to be focused on building their businesses, not just building pool infrastructure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where the conversation stopped being about architecture.<\/p>\n Stablecoin reserves are, at today\u2019s scale, a rounding error against the U.S. deposit base. Sussman said that\u2019s the only reason the industry can still debate stablecoins as a payments-innovation story. Change the denominator and the story changes with it.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re talking about $5 trillion, $10 trillion of stablecoin scale, that giant sucking sound is going to be all the deposits leaving all of the regional and community banks,\u201d Sussman said.<\/p>\n Sussman said the mechanics of that outcome aren\u2019t complicated, and that\u2019s exactly what makes them dangerous. Every dollar of stablecoin in circulation is backed by something. That something is cash and high-quality liquid assets, and it has to be held somewhere.<\/p>\n Today, \u201csomewhere\u201d means a short list of very large institutions with the custody infrastructure, the balance-sheet capacity and the operational tolerance for always-on settlement at scale.<\/p>\n So the money doesn\u2019t disappear. It relocates. A deposit that used to sit at a $4 billion bank in Ohio, funding loans in that bank\u2019s own market, becomes a reserve balance parked at an institution that has never heard of Ohio. The community bank doesn\u2019t lose a payments product. It loses a deposit.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s the part of the stablecoin conversation regional bankers haven\u2019t yet fully digested. And it reframes what \u201chaving a digital-asset strategy\u201d is supposed to accomplish. The point was never to own a rail. The point is to avoid being disintermediated out of their own deposit base one by one.<\/p>\n Which is the clearest way to understand what Tassat is now building.<\/p>\n Under Sussman, who\u2019s been CEO for just about a year, the company has organized around three fronts. Digital-asset capital markets, tokenized bank products and stablecoin infrastructure. Lynq, its real-time settlement and collateral network backed by tokenized Treasuries, sits on the capital markets side. Tassat is also supplying technology to an interbank tokenized deposit effort.<\/p>\n The piece aimed at the reginal bank deposit problem is Project NENYA, introduced in July 2026 and slated to launch in early 2027. NENYA is designed to help stablecoin issuers distribute reserves across cash deposits and tokenized high-quality liquid assets. And, on the other side of that transaction, to give banks a way to compete for those balances.<\/p>\n Sussman said that Tassat isn\u2019t proposing to move anyone\u2019s money faster. It\u2019s proposing to open a market that\u2019s currently closed by default. Right now a stablecoin issuer\u2019s reserves land where the plumbing already reaches, which means they land with the biggest players. NENYA\u2019s premise is that reserve deposits should be something a midsize bank can pitch for on price and terms, the way it competes for any other commercial deposit relationship, rather than something it watches flow past on its way to a custody desk in Manhattan.<\/p>\n Not a rail, but an auction, more or less. And it\u2019s a materially different bet from the one most of the market is making.<\/p>\n Sussman thinks the distinction is about to matter a great deal, because he expects the underlying infrastructure to commoditize. When issuing a token and moving a token become table stakes, and he believes they will, the technical achievement stops being an advantage. What is left is liquidity, distribution and applications.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat everybody\u2019s focused on today is mind share and market share,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s ultimately where the game is won.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a load-bearing assumption underneath all of this, and Webster named it before the conversation closed.<\/p>\n Every projection of trillions in stablecoin float, every warning about deposit flight, every business case built on top of both, depends on ordinary commercial customers deciding that stablecoins are worth switching to. Not interesting. Not innovative. Better.<\/p>\n \u201cIt goes back to the use cases for stablecoins,\u201d Webster said. \u201cSomeone has to think that they\u2019re good enough or better than what they\u2019re using today in order to drive the demand.\u201d<\/p>\n Sussman doesn\u2019t dispute it. He acknowledges that the applications that would justify the buildout largely haven\u2019t been built yet. \u201cStablecoins are going to need to thrive on programmatic use cases and applications, many of which are yet to be developed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Which they both agreed leaves the industry in an unusual and slightly absurd position. An enormous amount of capital deployed against a demand curve nobody has seen. The rails are laid. The passengers are hypothetical.<\/p>\n Sussman\u2019s argument is that this is precisely why banks below the megabank tier should spend their money on customers rather than on plumbing. And why the institution that ends up mattering may not be the one that built the best network, but the one that made sure its clients had a reason to be on it.<\/p>\n In other words, the rails will get built either way. The deposits are the thing worth fighting over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conversations about stablecoins have a way of turning into conversations about technology. Which chain, which standard, whose rail. When PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster sat down with Tassat CEO Glen Sussman for the \u201cMonday Conversation\u201d series, she put a plainer question on the table. \u201cHow many rails do we need?\u201d The real answer is probably fewer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435224,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[235,203,210,234,231,232,237,238,236,233],"class_list":["post-435223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blockchain","tag-bitcoin","tag-crypto-currency","tag-elon-musk","tag-ethereum","tag-hyperledger","tag-ibm","tag-mining","tag-nodes","tag-spacex","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435225,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435223\/revisions\/435225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Stablecoin Whiplash<\/h2>\n
The Arithmetic Nobody Does Onstage<\/h2>\n
Giving Regional Banks a Seat at the Digital Assets Table<\/h2>\n
The Assumption Everyone Is Making<\/h2>\n