Ran "Goldi" Goldshtein has been working on payments and blockchain since 2016, back when, as he puts it, nobody cared about payments on the blockchain. He built a payments company, weathered multiple crypto winters, got acquired by Fireblocks in 2021, and has been leading their Payments and Network divisions ever since. He was also part of the Facebook Diem project, which means he carries more stablecoin scar tissue than most people in the room.
Dayana sat down with Goldi live on the floor at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam for an episode of Payments Pulse, WalletConnect Pay's talk show on the convergence of traditional and digital finance. It was also our first-ever live guest at the event, and he kicked things off with the kind of energy the conversation deserved.
Goldi's vantage point is rare. Fireblocks moves $7 trillion a year and powers neobanks, fintechs, and payment operators at scale. More than 55% of their current pipeline is now payment companies and banks. When he talks about where stablecoin adoption is actually heading, he's reading from live data, not a slide deck.
In this episode, Goldi breaks down why stablecoins are already everyday money in Argentina and Turkey even if they're invisible in Europe and the US, why the GENIUS Act matters more than MiCA right now, where payment rails genuinely fail versus where they work fine, and why payouts are the fastest-growing use case nobody is talking about loudly enough.
Full Transcript
Dayana: Welcome to the Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show, now live at Money20/20 in Amsterdam. We're so excited for our guest today. This is not the first time we're meeting, and he just told me off camera that he's been using WalletConnect for 11 years. Please welcome Fireblocks' very own Goldi. Welcome to the show.
Goldi: Thank you for having me. This is so exciting to be on the floor at Money20/20. Super happy to do this live.
Dayana: You're actually our very first live guest. We ask every guest the same opener: what did you do before Fireblocks, and how did you get here?
Goldi: I won't give you my whole life story since we only have thirty minutes. But the short version is I was a geek growing up, all into computers, had five startups that failed and a couple that did better. Before Fireblocks I started a payments company on blockchain, in 2016, when absolutely nobody cared about payments on the blockchain. We weathered the crypto winters, the bear markets, all of it, and at the end of 2021 we were acquired by Fireblocks. I was brought in to lead the payments and network divisions and I've been there for five years now.
Dayana: You were way ahead of your time.
Goldi: Definitely, which is why I look like I'm sixty. I was doing stablecoins back when we called them fiat-pegged assets. I was part of the Facebook Diem project. I have a lot of scars from stablecoins and payments, but they're all positive ones that brought us to this moment.
Dayana: Stablecoins now handle trillions in annual volume, yet most consumers have never spent one. Why is there still this gap and what's holding people back?
Goldi: I want to push back on the framing slightly. Because if you went to Argentina right now, you'd see signs in probably 60% of stores saying you get a 10% discount if you pay with USDC or USDT. If you go to Turkey and want to buy a coffee, the most-used dollar is USDT on Tron. The people using neobanks and embedded wallet apps across Africa and Latin America are already used to stablecoins. So the gap is more geographic than it is universal.
That said, I'll give you the caveat: I actually don't think consumers should need to use stablecoins directly. I've always been in the camp, and this is why I don't get invited to the cool DeFi parties, that what's happening right now is an upgrade to our financial infrastructure. If you're using Cash App, Venmo, Revolut, or Nubank, you just want to move money. You don't care whether it's a stablecoin or an omnibus account behind the scenes. So hopefully people won't use stablecoins in the way you mean, because the financial institutions powering those products will use them instead. The main hurdle to getting there is regulatory frameworks, more than anything else. Not the fun answer, but it's the honest one.
Dayana: That leads perfectly into the regulatory question. Clarity is finally arriving in the US, Europe, and parts of Asia. What's the most impactful legislation right now?
Goldi: The GENIUS Act, and I'll explain why. MiCA came out first and people were excited about it, and rightly so. It felt like the holy grail of regulatory frameworks, especially when the US was completely stagnant. But fast forward to 2026 and MiCA is starting to feel like it needs adjustment for a lot of people in Europe. Getting the licenses takes time. There's CASP licensing on top of existing EMI obligations. There's some confusion. Meanwhile the GENIUS Act gave financial institutions, banks, and fintechs in the US a real sense of comfort and a framework they could operate within. And I think that has propagated further globally. Regulators in Europe are now looking at it and asking what adaptations they need to make. I'd also watch the Clarity Act, which is still working its way through. But if I have to name one, GENIUS Act is the thing that genuinely shifted the industry, alongside the change in administration. Whatever you think about politics, what happened in the US over the last two years has been phenomenal for this space.
Dayana: Where do payment rails actually fail and how do stablecoins help fix that?
Goldi: First I'll say this: stablecoins are not the magic answer to everything. You go on LinkedIn today and stablecoins are apparently solving world hunger. The reality is more nuanced. Eighty percent of SWIFT transfers between Europe and the US settle within 15 minutes. That's actually a shocking and underappreciated fact. The real failures happen at the edges: when you're transferring from the US to someone outside the core corridors, going through three corresponding banks, with no transparency and no predictability. Or when you're doing a marketplace payout to someone distant and it disappears into a chain of providers. That's where things genuinely break down.
So where stablecoins contribute is in those specific scenarios, and primarily through three properties: speed, transparency, and predictability. Not cost, by the way. Stablecoins aren't cheaper. But if you can derive value from being faster, more transparent, and more predictable for your users and business, then great. Let's just not pretend the entire system is broken, because most of it isn't. Let's fix what's actually broken.
Dayana: Cross-border payments is always cited as the number one use case. What else should we be talking about?
Goldi: Programmability. When I started doing this more than a decade ago, programmability was the exciting topic, the idea that a piece of money could have code in it and do more interesting things. Nobody's really talking about it now because as an industry we collectively decided to simplify the message first, get people comfortable with the concept of a digital dollar or digital euro, and then move forward. But it's still there and it still matters.
The other underexplored area is privacy. If money can be represented as code, you can do much more sophisticated things around privacy and payment mechanics. Take subscription management: if you want to cancel Netflix today, you have to either go to Netflix directly or call your card company. In a world where your wallet is transparent and connected to all your digital assets and subscriptions, you'd just see everything in one place and act on it directly. We're not there yet, but programmability and privacy are the areas where the most interesting work still needs to happen.
Dayana: Where does the stablecoin economy go in the next one to three years?
Goldi: For the next 12 to 18 months, I'm seeing it clearly from our internal data at Fireblocks: more than 55% of our pipeline right now is payment companies and banks. So expect more neobanks and fintechs adopting stablecoins for parts of their payment corridors. Then in 2027, banks become the real story. And if you're asking about 2028, I genuinely think the next wave is real world assets. The DTCC announced recently that they're tokenising a significant portion of what they hold in partnership with Stellar. They move quadrillions a year. Money market funds coming on chain, treasury assets becoming available on-chain, that will be the defining wave of 2027 and 2028. What happens in 2029? Come back for the next episode.
Dayana: Fireblocks started as institutional custody infrastructure but has increasingly moved into powering stablecoin issuance and settlement flows. Where does the custody layer end and the payments layer begin, and why does that boundary matter for your clients?
Goldi: We started by saying we want to make this space secure. How do you secure transfers? Then we realised it wasn't just about transfers, it was about wallets. And from there we added layers: enterprise wallet management, support for asset managers and neobanks, yield, tokenisation, issuance, payment companies. The custody model itself matters less than people think. Today you have direct custody, embedded wallets, non-custodial wallets, and all of them are valid for different use cases. Companies like Revolut and Robinhood started custodial not because it was the best technical setup but because it was easier, and over time they've moved toward embedded and non-custodial models to support more coins and add yield and other services. What actually matters for us is security at scale. We're powering hundreds of millions of users and moving $7 trillion a year. The question we're always answering is: how do you support all of this orchestration and money movement without your treasury, risk, and compliance teams having a heart attack on day one?
Dayana: You sit underneath a huge number of stablecoin issuers and payment operators. Which part of the stack is the most underbuilt right now?
Goldi: Liquidity, without question. USDC and USDT are easy to get anywhere in the world. But if you want a Mexican stablecoin, a Brazilian stablecoin, a Singaporean stablecoin, liquidity is scarce. And that becomes a real problem when you want to run global money movement at scale on local stablecoins. The FX and liquidity infrastructure for this industry needs serious work. People are building it, but if you're looking for where to focus, that's the gap. I've been at this for a decade and I know it's a marathon, we'll get there.
Dayana: Final question. You see flows almost no one else can. Without naming names, what's the most surprising pattern you're seeing right now?
Goldi: The highest-growing payments use case we've seen over the last twelve months is payouts. Everyone talked about payouts for a long time: marketplace payouts, payrolls, gig economy disbursements. But it remained relatively small. Right now it's growing 30% quarter over quarter. Something that was maybe $2 billion last year has reached double-digit billions on our platform. That tells me more neobanks and fintechs are treating stablecoin payouts as a genuinely valid way to move money to their users. That's really encouraging.
Dayana: Super bullish. Goldi, thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse.
Goldi: Thank you, loved it.