Keith Grose is a payments person who ended up in crypto, and he's pretty upfront about that. He started at Google working on Google Pay and Google Wallet, moved into open banking at Plaid where he opened up the UK and European markets, and is now Senior Country Director at Coinbase, leading their UK business. That arc, from consumer payments infrastructure to open banking to the largest crypto exchange in the US, gives him a grounded, infrastructure-first lens on what stablecoin adoption actually requires.
Dayana sat down with Keith at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam for an episode of Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show on the convergence of traditional and digital finance. Coinbase sits in a genuinely unusual position in the stablecoin stack: they have Base as a Layer 2, USDC through their Circle relationship, Coinbase Pay, and a retail base of tens of millions of users. That's more pieces of the puzzle in one place than almost anyone else.
In this episode, Keith breaks down why treasury management is the underrated stablecoin use case, why the GENIUS Act was the domino that started a global regulatory chain reaction, how Coinbase is thinking about merchant adoption following their Checkout.com deal, and why cards, far from being the enemy of stablecoins, might be the thing that introduces most people to them.
Full Transcript
Dayana: Welcome to Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show where we discuss anything payments, from traditional finance to digital finance and the convergence of the two. Today we have a very special guest, Keith Grose, Senior Country Director for Coinbase in the UK. Keith, welcome to the show. First question we ask all our guests: what did you do before your current role and how did you get here?
Keith Grose: Thanks for having me, Dayana. So I'm a payments person who ended up in crypto. I started at Google working on Google Pay and Google Wallet, then moved into open banking where I worked at Plaid and opened up the UK and Europe for them, which is what brought me to this side of the Atlantic. And now I'm at Coinbase leading their UK business. My whole career has basically been about how money moves through the pipes of the internet.
Dayana: You're at the perfect place for this conversation. Stablecoins now account for trillions in volume, yet most people have still never actually spent one. What does it take for stablecoins to become the de facto payment method?
Keith Grose: A few things. Honestly, I'm not sure users need to know they're using stablecoins for this to work. For that to happen though, it has to be spendable, it has to fit into their day-to-day life. The adoption you're seeing today is concentrated in businesses and users in emerging markets where there's a real pain point around cross-border payments or holding a stable currency. For stablecoins to work their way into developed markets, you need to be able to spend them at point of sale and pay bills with them. That infrastructure is coming, and I know WalletConnect is helping build it. But in the long run, users don't need to know whether they're paying with a stablecoin or something else. They just need to know it's instant, cheap, and sends at the scale of the internet. They'll feel the value without needing to understand the underlying instrument.
Dayana: Every guest on this show in Amsterdam has said exactly that. Where do you think payment rails fall short today and what might the solution look like?
Keith Grose: Cross-border payments, both on the consumer and business side. There are still corridors, Brazil to Nigeria for example, where you might lose 5, 10, even 15% of the transaction value in fees, and it takes three to five days to settle. That's where stablecoins are genuinely transformative. Right now a lot of this is still stablecoin sandwiches with fiat on either side, but you're seeing more businesses and users who actually want to hold stablecoins directly. When that happens it becomes a simple wallet transaction executed onchain, which is highly efficient. The infrastructure that really needs to change is those cross-border rails between emerging markets and developed markets. And beyond that, you need to be able to settle, handle chargebacks, and do everything you're used to doing with cards, but with stablecoins underneath, and ideally directly from a wallet at point of sale.
Dayana: Cross-border has been touted as the number one use case. What else isn't being talked about enough?
Keith Grose: Two things. First, people underestimate how much of stablecoin volume today still comes from its original use case: being the cash leg onchain for large crypto trades. Major hedge funds and institutional players still use stablecoins for that at significant scale. That's still a huge part of total volume and it matters.
The second one is treasury management. This is one I feel personally at Coinbase. If you're a multinational company, you need to balance and move US dollars, euros, sterling, and Singapore dollars around the world constantly. Doing that only during banking hours in each local market simply doesn't work for how treasury management needs to operate today. CFOs and treasurers are increasingly asking how they can put money to work at constant yield and move it instantly. That's happening now through platforms and infrastructure that let companies use stablecoins to manage internal payment flows. It's a really important use case that most people don't know about yet.
Dayana: If you had to pick one piece of legislation as the most important, what would it be?
Keith Grose: The GENIUS Act. That's what legalised and regulated stablecoins in the US, and it kicked off what became stablecoin summer last year and the volume growth we saw. But beyond that, it started a domino effect. Every major regulator around the world is now creating their own stablecoin regulation. In the UK, where I'm focused, the FCA has something coming in the next two to three months. GENIUS Act was the domino that tipped it over, and now stablecoin regulation is becoming a genuinely global phenomenon across every major market.
Dayana: Where do you see stablecoin finance in the next one to three years?
Keith Grose: A few bets. I think stablecoin issuance volume hits a trillion. We're at around $300 billion now, so that's roughly a tripling in two years. I also think you'll see people automating their financial management onchain using stablecoins, because you can now give an agent access to a wallet. So someone could have a savings account, a spending account, equity exposure, bond yield, all managed automatically onchain with stablecoins as the instrument. That'll happen first in emerging markets and move to developed markets over time. It sounds futuristic but I think it's closer than people expect.
Dayana: Coinbase has Base as a Layer 2, USDC through your Circle relationship, Coinbase Pay, and tens of millions of retail users. That's more pieces of the stablecoin puzzle in one place than arguably anyone else. What's stopping you from owning the end-to-end flow today?
Keith Grose: We are building pieces of that end-to-end flow today. The thing that takes all of Coinbase's pieces and gets them to end users is merchant adoption, making it easy for merchants to actually turn on stablecoin rails. We just announced a major deal with Checkout.com where they can enable stablecoin rails for all of their merchants, including their largest ones. That's the kind of partnership and network growth that bridges Coinbase's infrastructure to real-world spending. Beyond that, I think Coinbase has the pieces to become a major player in this space and it's something we're very focused on.
Dayana: A lot of your retail users hold USDC but mostly as a store of value rather than for everyday spending like groceries or rent. What would it take for them to actually start spending it?
Keith Grose: Making it accessible at point of sale, primarily. I'm actually a good example: I still use cards day to day, but I pay off my Coinbase credit card balance automatically using stablecoins every month. We also have a debit card that lets you spend directly from your stablecoin balance. Over time the goal is to get to a world where you're spending directly from your wallet. But I think cards are the mechanism through which most people will first encounter stablecoins as a settlement layer, even if they don't realise it. Cards aren't the enemy here. They're the on-ramp. And then gradually the market moves toward direct wallet-to-merchant settlement as the more efficient delivery mechanism at point of sale.
Dayana: Keith, thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse.
Keith Grose: Thank you for having me.