Beyond Crypto: How Stablecoins Are Building a Faster, More Accessible Financial System

David Sutter is CEO and co-founder of OpenTrade, which he’s grown to over $350 million in TVL and over $600 million in cumulative transaction volume, building the stablecoin yield infrastructure now used by fintechs and financial institutions worldwide. He’s been in the space for over a decade. He built one of the first Bitcoin wallets on iOS in 2013, co-founded Hijro, an early blockchain-based trade finance platform, and was Chief Product Officer at Marco Polo Network, a B2B network used by more than 30 financial institutions. Before OpenTrade, he led network strategy at Centre, the Circle and Coinbase joint venture that governed USDC. He’s a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and lives in the United States.

1. You started OpenTrade in 2023. What did you see then that the market hadn’t caught up to yet?
   
   The stablecoin market was growing incredibly fast, and our thesis was that yield would become a critical infrastructure for that emerging stablecoin economy. At the time, almost all of the time and investment in the stablecoin ecosystem was going to on/off ramps and wallets/custody, and there were no good options for earning safe, predictable, and compliant yield on stablecoins at rest.
   
   We knew this would become a critical part of the ecosystem and that fintechs building the next generation of financial services on stablecoin rails would all need to earn yield and pay yield to their customers in a safe, compliant, and predictable way. That’s why we launched OpenTrade, and our thesis has proved true. Yield is now the number 1 way stablecoin-powered fintechs acquire, retain, and monetize users.
   
2. Stablecoins have evolved from mostly retail use to institutional adoption. What’s driving fintechs, banks, and payment companies to adopt them today?
   
   Cross-border payments today are woefully inadequate for our hyperconnected, always-on society. The systems and frameworks they run on were largely designed in the 70s and 80s, and most advancements (such as internet banking) have just been new wrappers on top of the same old architecture. Stablecoins, on the other hand, have inherited almost no legacy baggage and were purpose-built for moving money over the internet. The specific benefits are use-case dependent, but generally speaking, they represent a faster, cheaper, smarter, more transparent, and more accessible way to store, send, and receive value over the internet.
3. How is today’s institutional demand for stablecoin yield different from the DeFi boom of previous years? It’s not entirely correlated with crypto-asset prices and adoption. It’s driven by real businesses building real products for real users.
   
4. Latin America is one of the world’s fastest-growing stablecoin markets. What do you think is driving this demand? The region has historically faced economic conditions and structural factors – inflation, currency volatility, FX controls, lack of trust in its banking sector – that have driven individuals and businesses to want and need to save and spend in USD. Historically, access to USD savings and investment products has been restricted only to the wealthiest.
   
   Now stablecoins enable anyone with an internet connection to save, spend, send, and receive USD, and that’s an incredibly powerful capability. In summary, stablecoins are filling a long-standing need and doing it in a way that is far more accessible and technology-forward. 
   
5. Why are yield products backed by real-world assets, which is OpenTrade’s core approach, becoming more attractive than purely on-chain alternatives?
   OpenTrade’s platform enables fintechs to earn yield and pay yield on idle stablecoin balances. It serves as both a treasury management tool as well as an infrastructure for powering end-user-facing savings and earn products. The primary way that yield is generated is through investments in high-quality “real-world assets,” which is a term that generally includes any asset whose returns are derived from sources outside the crypto-economy. Examples include money market funds, sovereign bonds, corporate bonds, fixed income ETFs, private credit, and other debt instruments issued by borrowers outside the crypto market.
   
   DeFi yield sources, on the other hand, have traditionally generated returns by lending against crypto-assets or lending unsecured to crypto market players, including prime brokers, market makers, trading firms, and exchanges. While historically these returns have, at times, been higher than RWA, that is because they typically carry much higher risks, and many of those risks are very difficult to quantify. Whether through market manipulation, cyber exploits, or fraud – we’ve seen pure DeFi yield products face heavy losses time and time again.
   
   As the market matures and more institutional, real-world players enter, they need a way to earn stable, predictable returns on stablecoin balances and are increasingly choosing real-world asset sources for doing so. 

6. What still makes launching a stablecoin yield product harder than it should be for a fintech? 
   
   If I just take our experience at OpenTrade as a proxy, we’ve spent years and tens of millions of dollars to develop the technical, operational, legal, financial, and risk management infrastructure required to operate yield products at scale in a safe, scalable, and efficient manner. We have had to onboard and integrate with over 60 different financial counterparties, including brokers, exchanges, custodians, cash management banks, on/off ramp providers, and more.
   
   We’ve had to establish bankruptcy-remote, cross-border legal frameworks that protect customers and their end users. We’ve had to invest heavily in cybersecurity and operational resilience. And on and on. For most fintechs, this is a daunting task. It takes years, teams of specialists, and a huge investment. That’s why we see fintechs continually opting to partner with a firm like OpenTrade instead of building these capabilities in-house. 

7. What’s the biggest misconception about building institutional-grade stablecoin yield infrastructure?
   
   There is a false narrative around the US CLARITY Act potentially “banning” all forms of generating yield on stablecoins. It’s true that some lawmakers and banking lobbyists are seeking to prohibit schemes that pay yield to users simply for holding stablecoins. In these schemes, the user does not invest or lend their stablecoins; they get paid simply for holding them idle in their wallet. But there are no proposals seeking to prohibit users from lending stablecoins, investing stablecoins, using stablecoins to buy securities or commodities, or any other type of risk-taking activity.
   
   Most yield products (including OpenTrade’s) do not pay yield simply for holding stablecoins idle; they require the user to lend, invest, or purchase another asset, and these would not be negatively impacted by the proposed language. 

8. How are stablecoins reshaping the financial system, and where does OpenTrade fit in?

This is a very broad questions as stablecoins are being employed in hundreds of different transformative use cases across payments (both cross border and domestic), capital markets, lending, trading, gaming, social media, AI, humanitarian aid, and more but generally speaking they are providing a foundational technology that makes moving dollars over the internet much faster, smarter, cheaper, more accessible, more programmable, and always-on. 

Stablecoin transaction volumes now surpass $30 trillion annually, higher than Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. And they are not just a crypto product for crypto users. Over a third of consumers in LATAM have made a purchase using a stablecoin. Fintechs around the world, especially in emerging markets, are increasingly building financial services on stablecoins like USDC. Unfortunately, those fintechs and their customers currently have little to no access to safe, compliant investment products for their stablecoin holdings.  

Our mission is to enable fintechs and their millions of customers around the world to invest stablecoins in safe, compliant yield products, with no more than two clicks, something many of them have never had the ability to do until now.

We believe that the next generation of financial services and markets will be built on digital dollars (i.e., stablecoins), and our role at OpenTrade is to build critical components for this burgeoning ecosystem: stable, secure, compliant stablecoin yield products that can be embedded directly in the digital wallets and apps businesses and individuals use to manage their financial lives. 

Cryptocurrency investments are highly volatile and carry significant risk, including possible loss of capital. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Always conduct your own research and seek professional guidance before investing.