Before founding Iron, Max von Wallenberg had already lived through nearly every era of financial technology.
He started his career at Lehman Brothers, ran one of Germany's largest crypto exchanges, built a DeFi wallet that Jupiter acquired, and led consumer fintech products similar to Robinhood and Trade Republic.
Few people have seen the financial system from as many angles.
That perspective shapes how he thinks about stablecoins, not as a crypto novelty, but as a fundamental infrastructure upgrade for how money moves.
Today, Max leads stablecoins at MoonPay while also serving as CEO of Iron, a stablecoin infrastructure company.
His focus is on the gap between where stablecoins are and where they need to go to become the default rails for global payments.
The insight he keeps coming back to is simple: consumer payment behavior is nearly impossible to change.
People swipe their Amex for points and don't feel the friction. The pain lives on the merchant side, in the form of fees. That's why the real stablecoin opportunity isn't at the point of sale — it's everywhere traditional banking breaks down.
Max sees three areas where stablecoins will define the next five years:
1. Cross-border payments are the clearest win
Real-time payment networks like SEPA and PIX work well within their own borders but don't speak to each other. Stablecoins act as a translation layer — cheap, fast, and reliable — connecting systems that were never designed to interoperate. This is already happening at scale.
2. Tokenization needs on-chain money
As more assets move on-chain — stocks, bonds, real assets — settlement needs programmable cash. Stablecoins fill that role. Clearing, margin, and institutional settlement are all moving in this direction, and the volumes involved dwarf anything in retail crypto.
3. Emerging markets want dollar access
In countries with volatile currencies and weak banking infrastructure, stablecoins give people a practical path to a digital dollar account. On and off-ramps are still a challenge, but the demand is already there and growing fast.
For MoonPay, Max is building the full stack: onramps, offramps, payments, and custom stablecoin issuance, all API-native.
The fintech perspective he brings is distinct from how crypto has traditionally used stablecoins. Where crypto treats them as trading instruments and reserve currencies, fintechs are using them as actual money infrastructure — building global banking experiences on top of them from day one.
That global-from-day-one model is what makes Iron's integration with WalletConnect Pay compelling.
When a user scans a QR code and pays with a crypto asset, Iron handles the conversion and settles the merchant in fiat. The merchant changes nothing. The complexity disappears. What remains is the speed and cost advantage of stablecoin rails with none of the operational friction.
Max's view of where this goes next is clear: B2B payments and cross-border remittance are the immediate battleground. PSPs and remittance companies are already recognizing the cost and speed advantages. And as tokenization of traditional assets accelerates, the institutional volumes will follow.
The technology is ready. The infrastructure is being built. What comes next is adoption — and it's arriving faster than most expect.
Tune in to WalletConnect's podcast the Payments Pulse to hear the extended interview with Dayana Aleksandrova and Max von Wallenberg, CEO of Iron, leading stablecoin strategy at MoonPay.