Nora Hocke:

In a not-so-distant future, you might be able to grab your morning coffee without ever needing to tap for payment.

AI Barista:

Good morning. Your usual? Oat milk, flat white?

Customer:

Sure. Add a muffin too.

AI Barista:

Confirmed. Payment processed. Delivery in 90 seconds.

Bianca Lopes:

A world where payments happen before you even reach for your wallet, where money moves faster than thought, and trust is built into the codes.

Nora Hocke:

That world used to sound like science fiction, but the reality is we're well on our way there.

Bianca Lopes:

Digital rails are being rebuilt beneath every transaction, faster, smarter, and secure by design.

Nora Hocke:

In this episode of Fintech Files from BCG Platinion, we're diving deep into the evolution of digital payment rails, how cybersecurity, blockchain, and new forms of currency are reshaping the way money moves.

Bianca Lopes:

And at the center of that transformation is Fireblocks, a company building the secure infrastructure, powering the next generation of payments.

Nora Hocke:

For decades, global payments have run on familiar rails, networks like Swift, card processors, and clearing houses that connect every bank business in central authority.

Bianca Lopes:

Money has always moved through them slowly, but verified, reconciled, and settled through layers of intermediaries. That is until a new system appeared.

Newscast Audio:

Bitcoin breaks a thousand dollars for the first time. Critics call it a bubble waiting to burn. Governments scrambled to respond to the rise of cryptocurrency. Could blockchain be the future of finance?

Nora Hocke:

Bitcoin and the digital currencies that followed promised instant borderless money, a revolutionary concept. In 2016, reports began to surface of coordinated cyber attacks on financial institutions across Asia that were later linked to a North Korean group.

Bianca Lopes:

Cut-off from the global banking system, the regime turned to cyber operations to fund itself, breaching the Swift network, siphoning millions from Bangladesh's Central Bank. Soon, the same tactics appeared in digital asset exchanges with South Korean platforms losing hundreds of millions.

Nora Hocke:

For cybersecurity experts, those incidents became case studies in how vulnerabilities could ripple through the global financial system. Among them was Michael Shaulov, a cybersecurity expert who would later go on to found Fireblocks.

Michael Shaulov:

I was working at that point in time at a company called Check Point, and somehow we got ourself involved in investigating part of that breach, and I think we kind of realized two things. I wasn't crypto at that point in time.

Bianca Lopes:

First, Michael and his team realized that attacks on digital assets were becoming increasingly organized.

Nora Hocke:

And second, that there was no equivalent of enterprise-grade security for the emerging blockchain economy.

Bianca Lopes:

At the time, few believed that digital assets would ever matter to institutions.

Nora Hocke:

But the team that would become Fireblocks saw the beginnings of a new financial rail, one that needed to be secured before it could be trusted.

Michael Shaulov:

So initially I thought that someone else is going to do something about this. So I was occasionally advising some cybersecurity VC. I go into this meeting with them after I've seen this hack and I'm telling them, "Hey, we should invest in a company that will do cybersecurity for crypto." There was this whole argument that evolved that basically the partners thought that it's a complete scam.

Bianca Lopes:

The idea was far from mainstream. So they began speaking directly with exchanges, hedge funds, and market makers to understand how digital assets were really being managed.

Nora Hocke:

And what they discovered was a fundamental gap.

Bianca Lopes:

Transactions worth millions were moving without the controls expected in traditional finance. No secure custody, no counterpart verification, and no clear accountability.

Nora Hocke:

Around that time, new hardware technology was emerging from Intel, Samsung, and Apple, trusted execution environments or security built directly into chips.

Michael Shaulov:

Back in 2018, we were within a fairly limited set of people that were familiar with this technology that was called trusted execution, right? But basically Samsung and Apple were the first ones that were playing around with how to do security th-at is built into the chip. Intel actually came out with the first version of it for servers called SGX.

And what I started to understand with my co-founders was that you can actually apply that technology to the problem at hand and create at least what we thought at that point in time a cybersecurity company for digital assets. Once we actually developed that and start going to market, we discovered that, okay, we are a Fintech infrastructure as a service that just happens to be secure by design with a secure infrastructure.

Bianca Lopes:

That approach, security by design, became the basis for Fireblocks.

Nora Hocke:

What began as an idea to secure crypto transactions evolved into a broader platform for moving digital value safely between institutions.

Bianca Lopes:

By 2020, the groundwork for institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure was in place, just as the world's on digital payments was about to accelerate.

Newscast Audio:

Breaking tonight, governments are ordering citizens to stay at home. Non-essential businesses closing their doors indefinitely. Delivery apps overwhelmed as online orders surge. Grocery chains roll out contact-free pickup and payment. Banks moved to remote service. Digital channels under strain.

Nora Hocke:

When the pandemic arrived in 2020, the shift to digital payments intensified overnight.

Bianca Lopes:

Contactless and online transactions became routine, while institutions began exploring how digital assets could serve their clients.

Nora Hocke:

As institutions rushed to digitize, a new layer of infrastructure began to emerge. Systems built to move money faster and more securely.

Bianca Lopes:

Payment platforms helped expand and accelerate global payment rails.

Nora Hocke:

Digital asset providers like Fireblocks built a secure infrastructure, enabling financial institutions to handle stablecoins in tokenized value.

Bianca Lopes:

Compliance and data firms added the trust layer, powering real-time monitoring, verification, and connectivity across financial systems.

Nora Hocke:

Together, these systems form much of the unseen backbone of today's digital payments.

Michael Shaulov:

Fireblocks, at the base of the base of that infrastructure, there are actually two components. The first one is the wallet infrastructure, which is essentially key management and connectivity to nodes. So that is the component that is responsible for securing the assets, securing the actual cryptocurrency or stablecoin or RWA when it's in your wallet in a stationary state. And it's also responsible for instructing the movement of the asset.

And the second component is the Fireblocks Network, which is responsible for authenticating the counterparties that you're sending money to and basically making sure that you're able to send instructions of what to do with the digital asset, basically financial instructions of why you are sending those assets. The thing that you really need to do is to make sure that you are putting as much security as possible before you send the transaction. You need to have completely different capabilities in order to authenticate who your counterparty is and eventually send those instructions.

And on top of it, you also need to have, which I think came in the last couple of years, capabilities to send as part of those authenticated instructions compliance information that is required through regulators, but it has to basically be instantaneous, bulletproof, and completely different, basically being done pre-transaction instead of post-transaction and relying on the fact that you'll be able to roll back those transactions because you can't.

So that's what I think is fundamentally different about Fireblocks and why I think we've been successful is because with the concept of the Fireblocks Network and the custody infrastructure and the wallets and the combination between the two, we were able to create a very secure, but very scalable and fast operating system for all those financial institutions adopting digital assets such that they can both be online, be transactional, but make sure that they have all the controls in place to guarantee that those transactions are actually going through to the right recipients with the right controls, with the right compliance, without slowing them down.

Bianca Lopes:

Institutional adoption grew quickly as companies sought speed and certainty. By 2022, digital assets were no longer limited to trading desks or custody platforms.

Nora Hocke:

A new form of digital money. Stablecoins, currencies designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the dollar or other fiat, had begun to find practical use in business transactions.

Bianca Lopes:

For years, these on-chain dollars were viewed as a niche tool for crypto markets. But as institutions searched for faster, lower-cost ways to move funds, their potential became harder to ignore.

Nora Hocke:

For many in the industry, the shift from theory to real-world application was sudden and unmistakable. Michael remembers one moment clearly.

Michael Shaulov:

Basically we sign up let's say our 10th customer, something like that.

Salesperson:

Hello, how may I help you?

Customer:

Yeah, I'd like to pay my invoice. Can I pay by credit card?

Salesperson:

Hold on one moment. Let me ask my boss.

Michael Shaulov:

Yeah, we are in this like WeWork. She sits behind me and like, "Hey, Michael, this guy wants to pay us using a credit card." I'm like, "How much is he supposed to pay?" She's like, "$30,000." I'm like, "I'm not going to pay $1,000 to Stripe to process a transaction. This is crazy." I'm scratching my head for a few minutes. I'm like, "Ask him if he has stablecoins." So she calls him and was like, "Do you mind paying us in stables?" And he's like, "Yeah, sure, I'll pay you with stables."

And we got this transaction immediately. We go open an account with Paxos. We off-ramped it to our bank account. It's free. And I'm like, wow, this is actually amazing. This is the future. And that, I think, for me I would say as a business owner was the epiphany of why this is so powerful and important. When you are a seed stage or I don't know, maybe a series A stage founder, if you have an opportunity to save $998, then you will take that opportunity.

Bianca Lopes:

For many small and mid-sized businesses, a thousand dollars in fees isn't trivial. In some cases, it can mean the difference between making payroll or not.

Nora Hocke:

In moments like that, the appeal of digital payments becomes obvious, faster settlement, lower cost, and no middle layers taking a share.

Bianca Lopes:

Stories like the one Michael and Fireblocks experienced were just some of the many that began to illustrate the tangible benefits of digital currencies.

Nora Hocke:

They showed how blockchain could extend existing payment systems rather than replace them, a complement to traditional finance.

Bianca Lopes:

By 2023, stablecoins and tokenized assets were entering treasury operations, cross-border settlements, and merchant payments.

Nora Hocke:

Security and compliance remained central, but the conversation had shifted beyond whether digital assets could be trusted to how they could be integrated.

Bianca Lopes:

Fireblocks became one of the several providers enabling this transition, embedding trust into the rails of an increasingly digital economy.

Nora Hocke:

The next challenge would take these ideas further, creating a secure global network for digital payments, linking banks, fintechs, and merchants directly.

Bianca Lopes:

At the turn of the decade, stablecoins had become a serious topic inside boardrooms across the payments industry.

Nora Hocke:

Executives weighed in on what role digital currencies could play in the future of money. Were they a threat or a new foundation for global payments?

Bianca Lopes:

One of the boldest attempts to connect global money movement to digital infrastructure came from Facebook.

Nora Hocke:

In 2019, the company announced Libra, a stablecoin project designed to let users send money as easily as sending a message.

Bianca Lopes:

It drew in some of the biggest names in finance and technology, including a former PayPal executive who at the time was one of the most senior people in Silicon Valley payments.

Michael Shaulov:

A friend of mine, he was the CEO of PayPal, and then he basically stepped down to go into Libra. And I had lunch with him. I was like, "Are you nuts? You're at the top of the top of the Fintech payment infrastructure. Why would you go to something like this? You are the most senior person that I know in Silicon Valley." And he told me, "Listen, I'm in the epicenter of international money movement."

And you know what's strange is that if you're trying to browse to a website in Japan, it loads within a second. You don't pay anything to anyone, and you're just basically moving a bunch of bytes from one server to another. But when you send money to Japan, it will take you three days. They will take $100 from you. It's super clunky. One out of 10 times it will get stuck and this has to go away." So when he told me that, I was like, wow, this is super interesting.

Nora Hocke:

That conversation captured the frustration many in payments were feeling, the sense that global money movement lagged decades behind the internet itself.

Bianca Lopes:

It also revealed how stablecoins could bridge that gap.

Michael Shaulov:

So then I convinced Goldie, the CEO of that company, that Libra is where they should invest. So they fully doubled down on stablecoins, but specifically for the Libra project. And then the Libra project got shut down and we were like, okay, they already built an infrastructure for stablecoins and they are knee-deep into understanding all those flows. We acquired their company.

And from there, it was a pretty incredible run because what happened was that we were able to be fairly early. We were able to partner with both all the crypto native companies that are enabling stablecoins. Companies like Bridge and MoonPay. Bridge is now part of Stripe, but basically MoonPay, Conduit, Alfredpay, TransferWise, and a lot of incredible companies that were really early in terms of building towards stablecoins.

And also all the traditional financial institutions that were interested in stablecoins we were their first partner like Worldpay, Visa, and of course, when Stripe acquired Bridge, Stripe as well. And I think we were fairly early to understand the opportunities and also the friction points and the use cases that they were solving for.

Nora Hocke:

The acquisition positioned Fireblocks to move quickly as stablecoin adoption accelerated

Bianca Lopes:

By 2024, the company's network was being used by thousands of institutions, not only for digital asset custody, but increasingly for payments.

Michael Shaulov:

We are probably at a point where we have about 2,000 financial institutions using Fireblocks, and larger, larger portion of it, maybe at that point about 10%, now 20% of those financial institutions are basically what you identify as payment companies. They don't go and trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, or various strategies around crypto. The only thing that they actually care about is moving stablecoins for the sake of payments.

And then what you're basically starting to see is that yes, like the DNS, the Fireblocks Network that we designed for crypto is useful for them. But actually what they're trying to do is something that is slightly different. They need on-ramps. They need off-ramps. They need the ability to do effects and swap either between stablecoin to stablecoin, or they need some kind of stablecoin to local currency on the other side. Compliance and specifically travel rule becomes non-negotiable.

Nora Hocke:

That shift signaled how much the industry had evolved.

Bianca Lopes:

Digital asset infrastructure had matured beyond speculation and was now about efficiency, interoperability, and compliance.

Nora Hocke:

Payment companies were building on blockchain, not to disrupt the system, but to make it faster and more connected.

Bianca Lopes:

But scaling those new rails exposed the familiar problem, fragmentation.

Nora Hocke:

Each market had its own on and off-ramp providers, its own licenses, APIs, and compliance rules.

Bianca Lopes:

Without standardization, cross-border payments remain complex and slow.

Michael Shaulov:

In crypto specifically, there is some confusion over there with travel rule because it works well when you have two centralized parties, but it is completely broken when you're dealing with non-custodial wallets. But the second that you start dealing with on and off-ramp, of course, you're dealing with centralized entities because they need to have some money transmission licenses that allow them access to the fiat rails. So it becomes non-negotiable.

And most of the activity, at least at this point in time, is around cross-border, because that's the most inefficient part of the traditional financial system that is just every time that I personally need to do it in Spain. And what you basically see is... Let's go two specific problems. The first one is they need a set of partners globally that each one of them is doing on-ramps and off-ramps in different territories, or at least on-ramps in different territories and across currencies.

And they need specific licenses that those people will have. They don't know where to start because you have some traditional payment service provider that is moving billions of dollars per day using Bank of America and J.P. Morgan. But now they're basically coming here. It's like, okay, who do I partner? Who's even a legitimate partner? And everybody pitching them.

They don't know who's doing an off-ramp in the Philippines. So fighting the partners is the first issue for them. And the second issue is that, okay, they found a partner. Let's say they found Bridge and they integrated with Bridge. And then they need to go and they expand the business and now they need another three partners. So each one of those partners, although they are doing very similar functionality, they have different APIs because there is no standard.

It's all bespoke. And this guy's doing this kind of travel rule. Those guys are doing a different type of travel rule. It's all nonstandard. No one from Swift came 50 years ago and basically standardized them into ISO 2021. So we're basically starting to see that, and that actually slows down businesses. It slows down people to activate to actually get up and running. It slows them down from expanding the use cases.

And we're like, okay, this is actually what we know how to do. We have the global network. We have all those parties. We know all of them. We like to connect between them. And we've been in the business of creating an authentication network and messaging network for connecting B2B players from 2018. So we're basically building... We analyzing exactly what's needed, and then we basically launching the Fireblocks Network for payments.

Bianca Lopes:

On September 4th, 2025, Fireblocks launched its network for payments, a neutral layer linking banks, payment processors, and stablecoin issuers through a single and secure API.

Nora Hocke:

It unites local payment rails, blockchains, and stablecoin systems so institutions can move money instantly while keeping compliance embedded in every transaction.

Bianca Lopes:

Just as Swift did for traditional banking, networks like this are becoming the connective tissue of the digital asset economy, the rails that make the future of money actually work.

Michael Shaulov:

You now have a global directory that is available on our website. And in our global directory, you can select the geography. You get all the partners over there. It tells you what services do they provide, do they do on-ramps, off-ramps, swaps, which currencies, what's their business model, et cetera, et cetera, what licenses do they carry. So you can find the partners.

You can start the onboarding with those partners. And it's guaranteed that those partners will basically once you onboard with them and they provide you their API key or essentially their credentials, it automatically connects to your Fireblocks account. And from that point on, it's basically a standardized set of instructions across all of them. That if you are an operation person, you can do that through the UI.

If you are building an automated system, you have one API, two Fireblocks that is basically a hub that standardizes all those instructions across all the providers that you want. And from that point, you can basically build your favorite payment flow, payment use case, go and innovate. You're not logged to a specific stablecoin. It works across all the stablecoins.

It works across over 100 geographies right now with 40 partners that we are launching with. We're going to add 10 partners per month over the next couple of months to that. So clearly we're going to expand that, but the idea is really to unlock and secure and scale the ecosystem.

Nora Hocke:

What began as cybersecurity infrastructure has become the plumbing of a new era, a live global network where transactions move instantly between regulated partners.

Bianca Lopes:

It is the modern counterpart to the messaging systems that once underpinned global banking. Only now it is programmable and constantly expanding.

Nora Hocke:

The next phase of finance is unfolding in real time. Institutions are already linking traditional systems and digital rails, so money can move anywhere instantly and securely.

Michael Shaulov:

In the next 12 months or 18 months, I'll be the most excited about the fact that I can just open my bank account and I can send money to my parents abroad, that live abroad. I can send them money at a click of a button. It arrives to their account immediately and not chase after both banks for three days to figure out where the money is.

That I would need to put reminders on my calendar that I need to do it in the banking hours, but I will be able to actually do it when I finish working or when I wake up in the morning. And I think that that's kind of the friction that is really unsolved and that on a personal level that can solve for all of us. I think that actually that reality is very, very close.

Nora Hocke:

This has been Fintech Files from BCG Platinion.

Bianca Lopes:

This season we're digging deep into the groundbreaking ideas that are reshaping the future of Fintech. We got some amazing guests lined up. I wish I could tell you, but I guess you're just going to have to wait and see. So make sure that you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time on Fintech Files.