06.24.2026

Company Update

Why Stablecoins Won't Save the World (But Will Fix What's Actually Broken): Fireblocks' Goldi on the Future of Payments Infrastructure

Goldi on Payments and Blockchain

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.

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 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 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. 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.

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. But fast forward to 2026 and MiCA is starting to feel like it needs adjustment for a lot of people in Europe. Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act gave financial institutions a framework they could operate within. I think that has propagated further globally. Regulators in Europe are now looking at it and asking what adaptations they need to make.

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. The real failures happen at the edges: when you're transferring from the US to someone outside core corridors, with no transparency and no predictability. That’s where things genuinely break down.

So where stablecoins contribute is in those specific scenarios, primarily through three properties: speed, transparency, and predictability. But if you can derive value from being faster, more transparent, and more predictable for your users, then great.

Dayana: Cross-border payments is always cited as the number one use case. What else should we be talking about?

Goldi: Programmability. It's the idea that a piece of money could have code in it and do more interesting things. Another area is privacy — if money can be represented as code, you can do much more sophisticated things around privacy and payment mechanics.

Dayana: Where does the stablecoin economy go in the next one to three years?

Goldi: For the next 12 to 18 months, expect more neobanks and fintechs adopting stablecoins for parts of their payment corridors. By 2027, banks become the real story. In 2028, the next wave is real world assets.

Dayana: Fireblocks started as institutional custody infrastructure but has increasingly moved into powering stablecoin issuance. 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. Today you have direct custody, embedded wallets, non-custodial wallets. What actually matters for us is security at scale.

Dayana: You see flows almost no one else can. What's the most surprising pattern you're seeing right now?

Goldi: The highest-growing payments use case we've seen is payouts. Right now it's growing 30% quarter over quarter.

Dayana: Super bullish. Goldi, thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse.

Goldi: Thank you, loved it.