In many ways, summer 2025 was all about the stablecoin. A meteoric rise for shares of stablecoin giant, Circle, since their public debut in just early June. Stablecoins have proven that moving money is really good for consumers, and merchants like it because they don't suffer from chargebacks. This category of crypto, which is known for being, well, stable, thanks to their pegged to the price of another asset like the U.S. Dollar, made it big in the U.S. when President Trump signed the Genius Act into law. And now, stablecoins are popping up in some surprising places. I am Wade Preston, co-founder of Prevail Coffee. Prevail Coffee is a specialty coffee brand. We are a roaster and micro-importer that also has four retail locations, two in Atlanta, one in Montgomery and one in Birmingham. And we work directly with farmers all across the globe to do direct trade partnerships of high quality specialty coffee. Wade's global coffee work led him to learn more about blockchain technology and how it could positively impact his business and others like it, as well as further global financial inclusion. As I got further and further into understanding the problems with the global coffee trade and the way that so many of the financial tools that we take for granted here in developed economies, things like risk mitigation, capital formation, cash flow smoothing, they're just non-existent in the developing world. That's when I discovered blockchain and it created the solutions to all the problems I was seeing. It also created opportunities for small businesses that are getting increasingly pinched out of capital markets here in the U.S. As well. Prevail Coffee is joining a mounting list of large and small U.S. Businesses looking to crypto to cut down on fees and potentially give customers a whole new way to back their favorite brand. Fees are a major cost for merchants. Say a customer buys a book from a bookstore using a Visa card issued by a random bank. That store then faces several middlemen before getting paid. An acquirer or third party bank talks to the merchant and the VisaNet payment network, the network talks to the customer's customers bank, then back through the cycle before reaching the original bookstore to receive payment. All along the way, fees are collected at multiple points. Stablecoins can simply be sent from a customer's wallet to the merchants. There's tremendous potential in stablecoins. It is one that should disrupt, to some extent, the traditional payment space we have today with credit and debit cards because it has the promise of faster, cheaper, more efficient and frankly, more convenient transactions for consumers and businesses. Just think about companies that have a very slim profit margin. So maybe they're making, let's say, 5%, 10% profit margin on the products they sell. Credit card fees can be like 3 to 4%. So you're talking about half of their earnings. Visa and Mastercard are two of the biggest players in the payment infrastructure space. Industry insiders have called on more competition to help merchants cut down on transaction processing fees, like the record $187 billion paid in 2024. For a small business like Prevail, those fees add up quickly. If credit card transaction fees were a employee in my business, they would be by far the highest paid employee in our business. So, you know, credit card networks and banks are making more money off of small businesses than the people who actually build and contribute to the success of those small businesses. Visa says the fees are necessary to support safe transactions. If this interchange did not exist, right, the consumer's Bank would find it very difficult to cover the cost it incurs for operating the card services like fraud prevention, delinquencies, systems maintenance, customer call centers, etc., etc.. Even as Visa says, those fees are necessary to facilitate traditional payments, Prevail is piloting an app to help customers pay with stablecoins using Coinbase's base platform. It's a way for the coffee company to cut down on those business costs. We've created the Drip Payment app, which plugs directly into Square POS using the APIs that Square allows. And people can open up the mobile app and they can onboard pretty seamlessly from their debit card right into stablecoins dollar-for-dollar using the base chain. And then they can use the app just like a normal mobile payment app to order coffee. The idea of integrating new technology in the midst of everyday small business owners is exciting, right? To have more accessibility, to integrate it into my daily life, I think that's the potential of, that we have going forward. And I just want to see more opportunities where that could be prevalent. Now, of course, there is a fee-free way for merchants to accept money right now, cash. A survey from the Federal Reserve, released in May 2025, found that around 80% of U.S. consumers held cash for at least one day of the month. But that survey also found that digital payments are growing. U.S. Consumers made an average of 11 payments per month using a mobile phone in 2024, up from four payments per month in 2018. As mobile payments become more common, stablecoins could be that low-fee way to pay. Prevail is looking to be a part of a stablecoin embrace in the US that the rest of the world has already seen. My name is Francisco Diz. I am a filmmaker, film director. I run my own production company out of Argentina, but I am worldwide. My clients are basically all over the world, and that's why I use stablecoins to receive and pay different providers I have. One of the problems with the traditional system is it involves numerous counterparties as your payment moves from your bank to your bank's correspondent bank, to the beneficiary's correspondent bank, and then finally to the beneficiary. So all of those layers of friction add to the cost. Typical international payment flows work like this. A person in the U.S. Wants to send 50 USD to a family member in Argentina so they go to a money transfer business. They hand over 60 USD to the sending agency thanks to a $10 fee, and the agency gets to work. They transfer the money to a paying agency in Argentina, but along the way, they deduct fees for foreign exchange, and in some cases, invest the money before delivery. Once the money is at the paying agency, minus all those fees, the family member collects Argentine pesos valued at around $49.84 in U.S. Dollars. Fees are off the roof. Timing is horrible. Banks like, maybe the wires bounce back or you don't know why and you have to reach out to the accountant and you don't know what happened. So yeah, for us, it's much easier and straightforward working with stablecoins. Remittances, which in this context refers to payments sent from one person in one country to someone in another in a low and middle-income country, reached an estimated $685 billion in 2024. That's greater than foreign direct investment and the official development assistance, two US government methods meant to boost the economic prospects of another country. We're definitely seeing growing use of stablecoins in remittances across emerging markets around the world. And one of the reasons for that is that the traditional correspondent banking system that we have for cross-border payments has been quite resistant to innovation and to bringing the cost down. Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing large growth in stablecoin usage due to depreciating currency values. Chainalysis data shows stablecoin usage has displaced Bitcoin and Ethereum as the most popular cryptocurrencies received. If you save up in pesos, you're doomed. If you spend in pesos, you're doomed. So Bitcoin, at first, was a great start point, but then I found stablecoins to be more reliable source of transaction. Legacy players all over have heard the calls for innovation and are working to remain on the forefront of this technology. The secondary product market fit is cross-border and that can be remittances, person-to-person, or business-to-business transactions. And in both of those areas, those are additive opportunities for Visa. We have leaned in because we said, okay, it actually does help with some use cases. Let's take its cross-border payments. But we can add our safety, our security, our trust that people feel they want to use it. Here in the U.S., we're not quite there yet. And there are still some hurdles, especially when it comes to anti-money laundering loopholes, transaction infrastructure and privacy risks. If you think about the nature of your transactions, you know, I'm, you know, doing an ACAMS event in Las Vegas, the next day I, you know, pay my son's PTA, you know, dues in Northern Virginia and then went to the University of Michigan. I buy a Michigan t-shirt. It doesn't take long seeing that to be able to put together, even if it's just a number on the blockchain, that weight, how many people fit that description, really. And to actually narrow it down to me. The Genius Act looked to solve some of those but some lawmakers are calling for follow up legislation to address these concerns. Despite that crypto product launches and competition have ramped up since the Genius Act's passage. And you're going to have lots of different players emerging that are going to try to do different things in stablecoins and in crypto more broadly. But I think ultimately what emerges from that scrum are a smaller number of at scale, globally embraced, um, forms of measure. And if stablecoins really take off for business like Prevail, it could unlock a whole new opportunities like tokenization, that could allow customers to back the brand and get rewarded. Click a CLIS, Community Led Investment Capital, that's our tokenization platform where we can tokenize small business rewards programs into an investable asset class. What we're doing with that is essentially bringing liquidity to loyalty rewards programs for small businesses. Instead of just having that point in a database somewhere that is wholly illiquid and can only be exchanged for, you know, product within that business, we're tokenizing them so that those points become tokens, and they have a liquidity pool attached to them, and they can be freely traded for other assets, including cash equivalents like stablecoins. So as you patronize a small business, you can actually participate in the financial upside of that business. So it creates new forms of stakeholder capitalism, allows for people who really believe in local brands and the quality and value that they deliver to their community, to enjoy the financial upside of that through holding that businesses's token.