# Reframing the Bear Market — Georgy Sokolov | Wirex

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2026-10-06
- Duration: 19:46
- Topics: People & Blogs
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-qTiKn8GcgBY
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTiKn8GcgBY

## Transcript

Hello guys. Um yeah everyone I think last year I was speaking as well and Philip was also presenting uh the speakers and whenever that happens I feel grossly underdressed. I mean look at that guy just uh the style is there. Um I yes my name is Georgie. As I as was presented I did not really found WX. I co-ounded it. So it was a team effort from day one and uh I have no illusions about being able to do anything like that by myself. Yeah. So uh we we are um so yeah let let's start with the uh thing I I hear quite a lot uh over the last year people are saying oh it's bare market everything is dead. Um I think it's not and we we'll try to tell you why. So, Yrex just to give a bit more context uh where we come from, who we are and how uh and why I personally got into it as well, we started in 2014 u pretty pretty early on. We often joke that we should have just uh bought Bitcoin and and sit still and and waited. Um but we instead were building um we were building with uh no ICOs with uh no VC money to start literally three guys with a laptop. In early 2015 we launched the world's first um crypto debit card which at the time wasn't even a crypto card. It was a Bitcoin card because Salana, stable coins, Ethereum, nothing of that yet existed. So it literally allowed you to convert your Bitcoin into dollars and and be able to spend it. Why we did it? uh because if crypto was meant or is meant to be money uh then it needs to be spendable, right? And if if if you cannot exchange money for goods and services, it's not money because that's one of the fundamental features. And the way to approach it was to uh as we saw it was to either go around and try and convince every single merchant in the world to accept cryptocurrency. Good luck with that even today. Uh back then it was impossible completely. So what we decided to try instead was to link cryptocurrency wallets or balances to a familiar tool that every user uh every consumer already had in that pocket, your credit or debit card. And we started talking to to everyone around and dozens if not more uh banks said no. Uh nevertheless in early 2015 we we shipped the first production um uh Bitcoin not even crypto debit card. since then Wy and and that's a picture from I can't even remember uh that's our app inuh 16 or 17 uh very basic very very uh small compared to what it is now we are at roughly 8 million registered users the service is available in over 100 countries uh and we've processed over $200 billion uh in transaction volumes we are a direct principal member of both Vis and Mastercards so we issue those cards ourselves for our own users and now also as infrastructure. Uh we are a UK uh emani institution. Um so basically that is all to explain u why we uh think we have a right to be here and try to convince you that we're not in a bare market. Um but the market is down. Uh Bitcoin is uh except last week uh uh the recent change Bitcoin is down. altcoins are dead. Uh uh no no no no more activity in memecoins or NFTs. So yeah, the sentiment is pretty low, but at the same time uh there are segments in the industry where there's never been more building than now. And it's almost uh how do I put it? Yeah, basically we we've been preaching this for over 10 years and it was never cool or sexy enough because it's much easier to launch an ICO or launch a memecoin and make millions of dollars than to do something as expensive and difficult as payments. But now finally, stable coins are all the rage and um payments are in the epicenter of what's happening. Of course, not just payments, you've got uh real world asset tokenization. people are trading uh tokenized oil and and and gold instead of uh instead of memecoins. So uh there are uh pockets in the market that are growing, but this one is focused on payments because that's what we know best. So uh there's plenty of uh neo banks building. So what one may ask there's maybe already too many? Well, firstly, we've seen this before. Um it's not the first time that uh um neo banks have been uh the number of uh aspiring neo banks has been growing. Uh but we think that this time is different. So firstly uh the the scale is finally there. Before uh you had 10 50 uh 100 new cryptocard companies every new bull run but the scale was never where it is now. And and it it it has been growing quite dramatically. Uh I think if we're talking onchain cards then in the last three years that market has grown a thousandfold. So three years ago this time uh the monthly onchain card transaction volume was at about a million a month. Now it's it's a billion a month. Um we that those figures are public publicly available on on payments scan. So it's all onchain activity. those don't include all the uh custodial card programs which are still I think dominating. So this is a good indicator but it's by far not all there is and even that one is growing and uh now there's over uh over 200 new banks building. Uh what are they building and what why do we think uh something is different this time? So uh there are several layers to it. uh and we think that the fundamental layers are now fun finally uh solved for. Uh when we were starting it was impossible to build anything like that on chain because a bitcoin transaction took uh anywhere between 12 minutes and an hour to confirm and Visa Mastercard transaction has a 2 to 300 millisecond window. Uh there's a bit of a mismatch there. So we had to collect the users funds first to be able to uh and not just us I mean anyone who was building in that space. Uh you had to hold the user funds and then uh be able to make it spendable because otherwise the the the transaction times are just not uh matching each other. Uh now it's finally possible and uh stable coins are out there. Dollar stable coins, non- dollar stable coins. Um but that's not that's not all there is. uh those uh two layers as I mentioned are fixed and I'm not I'm not saying they're finished uh but thanks to uh largely to to people like you the builders those are fundamentally sold for payments uh because now we actually have fast chains and uh now it's possible to uh finally move to this uh uh initial aspiration of crypto of being being your own bank not just being able to spend crypto anyhow but spend it actually from your onchain balance. Um so stable coins are all the rage and uh 62 trillion uh moved within the last year. Uh but that is uh movement between wallets. It's it's a huge number but only 40 400 billion of those are uh were used for buying something. So well under 1%. Uh the rest of it is just uh trading, moving money between exchanges, uh liquidity being shuffled around. It it's not those uh productive cases. I mean those cases also need to exist, right? And they have every reason to exist, but uh they have nothing to do with uh the feature of money which is which is payments. So payments is still uh uh quite underwhelming in terms of volumes on chain. uh and if we look at uh circle because almost everyone when talking about stable coins publish those huge numbers of transactions settled which does not necessarily uh give representative figures. So circle uh recently published in there because they're a public company now. So they have to uh publish those um that uh moved on chain uh and that's USDC right and that's moved on chain uh in that uh I think it's yeah it was uh Q Q2 uh this year uh nearly 15 trillion moved onchain in USDC and only about uh 15 billion of those uh moved uh were used for payments. payments passed through the uh circle payments network which is the network they have specifically for payments. So these numbers pretty much match the previous ones that it's just just around 1% of stable coins are actually used for for real life payments. Um to give a perspective uh the global payments market uh retail payments market is at nearly what is it like 50 trillion uh almost uh that is yearly this is quarterly but still gives you the idea. So stable coins just USDC moved on chain is already bigger than the global retail payments market but the part of it that's used for payments is still very uh very small still underwhelming. Now uh where is that payment activity? Uh the userto-user or P2P payments have been growing at about 5% uh a year. So nothing nothing massive. uh QR payments that are growing uh worldwide especially in in emerging markets. Uh but I think crypto has not yet uh picked up on on on that front. I'm pretty sure in the in the for like real world payments QR uh growth numbers are much higher than that and that's something uh ourselves included and a lot of people are building towards I think that's uh a big part of the future but in the current uh conditions uh the yearon-year uh growth and the the majority of the volumes for uh stable coin payments for real world goods and services that's uh mostly all on cards And that's been so far the fastest growing um the fastest growing sector. What has changed to to enable the change that I mentioned a bit earlier from uh the ability to just spend crypto uh to the ability to spend crypto directly from your onchain wallet. And again for for the mass consumer the difference probably doesn't matter that much. most people will not understand but they don't really need to understand because by now it's possible to abstract all that complexity away. So we've got account abstraction uh and the seed phrase is no longer a requirement. You don't have to frighten your user at at the onboarding uh saying that save your seed phrase now or you lose your money forever later. Uh there are much u more uh convenient ways to uh deal with that. Uh account obstruction allows to link onchain balances to your cards to your uh banking um uh banking details to your QR code payment rails etc. Uh gas can be sponsored so you don't have as a user you don't have to worry about gas anymore whereas before uh it wouldn't have been possible no one would buy coffee for $5 that you have to pay even five cents in gas fees. uh now that can be abstracted away and sponsored by the uh issuing business and because those uh fees on on on faster and cheaper chains are almost negligible. It's it's u quite affordable and yeah L2 economics just made a $2 payment possible whereas before anything under $50 would have been um unjustifiable. Uh so that is solved. Chain abstraction is solved. uh bridging it solved. Uh after after this this year's events, I would not be so certain about security. There's still a lot of work to to be done there. So that's a a space to continue building in. Uh but in terms of uh the two bottom layers of of um of the whole payment stack, uh the chain, the blockchain and the stable coins, those are pretty much solved and and and ready to to be built on. Now think most people think that yeah uh launch a stable coin coin card program because stable coins and blockchains are all solved. Uh so yeah just connect to the API connect to wallet and it's done. But that's only about 10% of the work. The other uh 20% uh sorry 90% is uh actually being able to issue those cards, being able to link it to bank accounts, uh settling with the Visa and Mastercards and the banks uh and whoever else is involved in this uh uh payment process, uh looking after compliance, getting your licenses. So that is the very complex part that is still there. Um but most teams building uh now don't have to worry about this because this can be uh this can be used from uh the providers who who who offer that and people building actual retail products can focus on on the retail offering and on their customers rather than on all this um underlying complex infrastructure taking a lot of capital and a lot of time. Uh and there still are two ways to build it. The more traditional way is uh a chain is just sitting pretty much on the side of the ledger. That's the model uh that is still prevalent. I think the the majority of volumes are still there. Those are the ones you cannot see on chain. Uh that's the custodial model where uh a app like I don't know crypto.com or binance or or whoever wy uh uh legacy custodial app the same way. So uh the operator the issuer serves as as the custodian which is easier from the point of view of settlements. It's faster to um it's faster to build. It's uh uh easier to handle balances but it comes with caveats. It uh it makes you subject to every single uh uh regulation that's that's out there because you're holding us the users funds. uh and earlier as I mentioned other other ways were not possible because uh the technology simply didn't allow for it but now you can actually build genuinely onchain with uh uh same functionality but the user holding their own funds in their own wallet and being their own bank uh without any impact on the uh user experience. you can enable the same functionality now and it's uh it's it's also chain agnostic pretty much uh who uh is already building on it a lot of a lot of neo banks I can give a few examples uh built on our infrastructure uh Koka is a non-custodial wallet uh that just needed to to add this functionality lobster is building it on stellar koka is building it on base and and wirex one our new non-custodial up is uh launching on arc when it goes public uh later in September and just to give you the idea of the economics what can change for a non-custodial so was was a non-custodial wallet before uh they added this new banking functionality so it had send and receive and some exchange functionality uh since they launched the uh card and iband products so effectively converted from just a web free wallet into a on onchain neo bank. These are the growth numbers. So it's it's it's pretty um pretty noticeable. No one will will want your wallet if if it just has the wallet functionality. If it has the full neo banking functionality, the target market can be much bigger. U whether you build it on your own chain or choose an existing chain is is a choice to evaluate. We learned the hard way that building on our own chain is is not the way forward. At the time when we were uh uh starting to build it, there was not that much option uh really cuz base didn't yet exist. Salana was not yet reliable at the time. So we we we did our own upchain roll up on Polygon, but only just to learn that who are we to to push people to our chain, right? We're not uh Coinbase. We're not Binance. Uh uh we're not even Kraken or or OKX, which each of them has their own chain, but I don't know anyone who uses those chains. So, uh we think that it's uh uh it makes more sense to to to be chain agnostic or multi-chain. Um and to uh getting closer to the end the that's the that's the current situation but the future uh the next customer is not human the next customer is agents and uh you can think of uh a whole number of use cases uh for now it's very nent I think uh Coinbase's X42 infrastructure only processed something like 165 million payments and uh totaling $50 million So it's a rounding error uh non-existent but that's the future. So per per call payments for interference uh GPU time uh per access payments for content uh for licensing agent to agent services when one agent pays another agent that's all the future for stable coin payments uh by by agents and uh when it comes to more consumer uh facing agents where your agent would pay for your trip or book your hotel or or pay for some service where the payment amount is high and there's the expectation of the possibility of chargeback I think that will still be on card rails but uh to the builder it doesn't really matter because the onchain tools are there the card infrastructure the banking rails infrastructure is connected to it so you can just build around it um and again a lot of people are building and the question is is it really worth uh the the risk isn't the competition going to be too high well on the one hand it is uh on the other hand if you look at the growth numbers of stable coin payments over the last years. Uh it there's a lot room to grow and still even with those 200 neo banks building onchain card products, it is still negligible amount of the global card spend overall. So the target market is still there. Um I think that's it. That's the message. So continue building. Don't think that this is a a bare market. We've definitely seen worse times and yeah, the way is up and open for questions now.