$190 TRILLION REIMAGINED: WALAPAY'S BRIDGE BETWEEN BANKING AND BLOCKCHAIN

WALAPAY S3.5

Every day, businesses worldwide struggle with cross-border payments that take nearly a week to settle and cost up to 4% in fees. Meanwhile, $4 trillion sits locked in funding accounts just to enable global trade.

In our latest episode of Stableminded, Tom Borgers, Co-Founder and CEO of Walapay, explains how his company is solving this massive inefficiency by creating the first seamless bridge between traditional banking and stablecoin rails.

Watch the full episode below or on Spotify to discover how this infrastructure could transform how $190 trillion moves across borders annually.

SEASON 3 SPONSOR: Dfns

Season 3 of Stableminded is powered by Dfns—the wallet infrastructure platform securing over $1 billion monthly, with zero hacks, and trusted by 130+ global fintechs, banks, and enterprises. From Fidelity to Coinbase, top players rely on Dfns to manage digital assets with unmatched security and seamless API integrations.

FROM BITCOIN CURIOSITY
TO FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Tom's journey began in 2013 when he first discovered Bitcoin in his college dorm room. While fascinated by the technology, he quickly realized Bitcoin alone wouldn't solve the payment challenges he'd experienced growing up between Europe, the US, and Japan.

It was Ethereum that changed everything. "It became super clear with something like Ethereum where you have this permissionless blockchain where you can actually start building things on top, financial use cases, fintech type of use cases, that was where the opportunity kind of became super clear to us," Tom explains.

This insight led him to ConsenSys, where he worked directly with Joe Lubin from 2017 to 2021, gaining invaluable exposure to foundational projects like Metamask and Infura while witnessing the birth of decentralized stablecoins.

Today, Walapay offers something revolutionary: a single API endpoint that enables money movement across any currency—from fiat to stablecoins—while remaining completely rail-agnostic.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

When a fintech like Decaf needs to help users convert their USDC to local currency in Latin America, they simply call Walapay's API. The process that traditionally would take nearly a week and cost up to 4% in fees now happens within minutes at a fraction of the cost.

This infrastructure powers three key use cases:

1. Business payments to emerging markets – Walapay's original focus, helping companies pay contractors globally

2. Dollar access in volatile markets – Enabling platforms like Decaf to provide stablecoin wallets with local off-ramps

3. Real-time settlement for PSPs – Allowing payment processors to offer instant multi-currency settlement to merchants

THE Dfns PARTNERSHIP:
FLEXIBLE CUSTODY FOR EVERY NEED

What makes Walapay's approach particularly powerful is its partnership with Dfns, enabling flexible custody models crucial for serving different customer types:

"The beauty of using and working with a company like Dfns is that they're able to offer kind of flexible custody models," Tom explains. Depending on the use case, Walapay can support either self-custody wallets—where the platform avoids liability—or fully custodial solutions for businesses requiring named accounts.

This flexibility allows Walapay to serve everything from crypto-native platforms to traditional PSPs and banking partners with varying regulatory requirements.

BEYOND PAYMENTS: STABLECOINS
AS YIELD-GENERATING INSTRUMENTS

Perhaps most revolutionary is how Walapay is transforming stablecoins from simple payment rails into sophisticated financial instruments.

"A stablecoin should be seen as a financial instrument," Tom emphasizes. "What it ultimately is at the end of the day is a representation of underlying assets, typically US treasuries being held in a bank account somewhere."

Working with partners like Paxos and Bridge, Walapay helps platforms convert idle deposits into yield-generating stablecoins, creating entirely new revenue streams for fintech businesses and their customers.

Despite stablecoins' growing adoption, Tom notes that "90% of B2B payment flows globally are still happening through banks." The current system involves countless intermediaries adding cost, complexity, and time to every transaction.

Walapay's vision isn't to replace banking but to collapse these unnecessary layers of intermediation—connecting banks and financial institutions directly to stablecoin rails to dramatically improve efficiency.

"There's about $190 trillion of cross-border money flows, about $4 trillion at any point in time of value that's locked up in funding accounts," Tom explains. "That's value that should be opened up for new kinds of opportunities."

Unlike many crypto startups that position themselves against traditional finance, Walapay's pragmatic approach acknowledges that banks aren't going away. The future isn't about replacing the system but bridging it—creating infrastructure that combines the best of both worlds.

To learn more about Walapay, watch the full episode out now on Youtube and Spotify

STABLEMINDED UPDATES

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• We have one more episode of Stableminded Season 3 to release, then we will hop into Season 4 focusing on stablecoin issuance sponsored by M^ 0

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Until next time, stay stable,

Drew and Zach