Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“I’m not a fan of stablecoins being co-opted by the cards world. I’m not a fan of cards on the front end of stablecoins because then the stablecoin is just another account feeding the legacy beast. This is not the intended future.”
Tony McLaughlin spent two decades at Citigroup as managing director of emerging payments, where he authored the Regulated Liability Network whitepaper, the conceptual scaffolding the Fed prototyped in its RLN proof of concept1 and the BIS extended into Project Agora. He then founded Ubyx, where he raised $10M to build the the clearing system for tokenized money.
In this conversation, we unpack why the “Tether/Circle duopoly” is a temporary trend, why every bank on earth is about to become a wallet provider, and why the “general-purpose” technology of blockchains will inevitably subsume special-purpose rails like ACH and SWIFT.
“I disagree with anyone who believes there’s going to be an oligopoly in stablecoin issuance.”
About Tony: Tony McLaughlin spent 20+ years at Citigroup, most recently as Managing Director of Emerging Payments. Earlier in his career he worked on continuous linked settlement at ABN AMRO and travelers' checks at Barclays in 1993, three decades of building payment infrastructure across every form factor that has ever existed. In March 2025 he left Citi to found Ubyx, the first global clearing system for stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with backing from Galaxy, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, VanEck, Paxos, LayerZero, Monerium and as of January 2026, Barclays, in what was the British bank's first-ever direct stablecoin infrastructure investment. He also convened the Tokenized Cash Management Advisory Group, a 20-corporate body that published its core principles for digital money in April.
Why is it important: The total stablecoin float crossed $323B in May 2026. Barclays just took its first stablecoin equity position in Ubyx. JPMorgan moved JPMD onto Canton in January and is now processing $5B in daily transactions through Kinexys. Citi’s tokenized deposit volumes went from millions to billions in a year. Genius Act issuers are queuing up in the US. Europeans banks are racing with Qivalis. And the Bank of England's proposed £20,000 retail holding cap on systemic stablecoins.
Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris.
Major speakers include Jenny Johnson (CEO, Franklin Templeton), Tom Lee (Chairman, Fundstrat), Stani Kulechov (Founder & CEO, Aave), Tom Zschach (CIO, Swift), Adam Back, Elliot Hentov (State Street, Chief Macro Policy Strategist) and more.
🎧 Jump to the best parts
00:00 Tony McLaughlin Introduction
01:29 Why Tony Left Citi
03:38 Why Stablecoin Monopolies Will Fail
07:16 Why Tony Built Ubyx
09:20 Why Stablecoins Could Collapse Payment Rails
13:19 Why Banks Need Stablecoin Deposits
17:27 The Real Stablecoin Business Model
22:14 Consortium Stablecoins and CBDCs
25:32 Building Ubyx
29:14 AI Agents and Stablecoin Payments
31:38 What Could Kill the Stablecoin Thesis
34:00 TThe BlackBerry Comparison
38:00 Corporate Adoption of Tokenized Money
42:58 Lightning Round
Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris. 51 Insights will be the official research partner.
👉 A few days to go: Grab your ticket now!
Important Links
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tony-mclaughlin-7b627a3
Whitepaper: https://www.ubyx.xyz/whitepaper
Website: https://ubyx.xyz/
Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts
Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:
1. The stablecoin duopoly is not the endgame
More than 82% of the stablecoin market sits with two issuers: Tether ($189B) and Circle ($76B). And, almost everyone is looking at them as the dominate players even in the future. Tony’s argument and it’s the most important reframe of the conversation, is that this is exactly what every adolescent payment network looks like before it pluralises. There was a point in time when there were only a few credit card issuers, all dollar-denominated, all US-based. Today, there are roughly 16,000 card issuers globally and the market shows no fragmentation. The acceptance layer absorbs all of them invisibly.
“Hundreds, and then thousands, of issuers. Hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of accepting points. I’ll be judged by that prediction over time.”
Tony's analogy to AOL and CompuServe is sharp: walled-garden pioneers always look unassailable until the open network arrives and the moat turns out to have been the entire business.
“America Online was the pre-internet portal to the information superhighway as we used to call it. There was something called CompuServe … All I'm saying is that what you observe at a point of time at the early stages of a market, if you extrapolate forward, you're probably making a mistake. And I think what's a far more likely outcome is that we will have eventually, and in the not too distant future, hundreds and then thousands … then millions of accepting points for tokenized money.
Why do we agree with him: Currently, Stablecoin accounts for 0.02% of global payments volumes. We are just at the start.
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2. General-purpose technology always subsumes special-purpose technology
Tony uses the “iPhone vs. Walkman” analogy to explain the future of payment rails. ACH, SWIFT, and Card Networks are special-purpose devices, they only do one thing (carry low-value messages, high-value messages, or authorizations).
“In the same way that we don’t have physical alarm clocks and calculators and Walkmans anymore, I think the business case to build a special-purpose payments rail... will become difficult to justify.”
Blockchains are general-purpose. They can represent a dollar, a stock, a piece of real estate, or a contract on the same infrastructure. Tony’s bet is that the cost-efficiency of general-purpose rails will eventually make special-purpose rails (like the current banking stack) obsolete.
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