Money Code

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Alfonso Gómez-Jordana and Rodrigo Fernández Touza, co-founders of Crossmint, a financial infrastructure company building wallets, stablecoin orchestration, and agentic commerce tools. They unpack why launching fintech globally can move from country-by-country banking integration...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Thierry Edde, Head of Crypto at Deel, to unpack what five years building global payroll infrastructure taught him about where stablecoins add value. They break down why workers want dollar balances inside payroll apps, why compliant stablecoin salaries still run through local fi...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh talk with Miles Suter, Bitcoin product lead at Block, about Cash App's new stablecoin experience and Block's long-running push to make Bitcoin everyday money. Miles explains why stablecoins now belong inside the same Cash App dollar balance as ACH and wires, why more than 40% of Light...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo sits down with Ben Milne, founder and CEO of Brale and founder of Dwolla, to talk about the stablecoin shift hiding inside payments P&Ls. Ben explains why issuance becoming "a non event" changes who can compete, how prefunding can turn stablecoins into a balance-sheet tool, and why payments co...

In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Ryan Bozarth, co-founder and CEO of Dakota, to unpack how Dakota went from building its own neobank to selling the regulated infrastructure layer behind the next generation of stablecoin-native fintechs. They dig into why building a neobank has shifted from a 12-18 month, multimillion-dollar project to something teams...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Amir Sarhangi, CEO and co-founder of Skyfire and former Ripple VP of Product, building the identity layer that lets AI agents transact on the existing web. They unpack why payments is the easy step in agentic commerce, how Skyfire's KYA token threads the existing web securit...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Anthony Soohoo, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, who joined the company to refound its 85-year-old network for the stablecoin and AI era. They unpack how MoneyGram's network of 500,000 retail locations across 200 countries is becoming an API layer for stablecoins, why "ca...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, host Chuk Okpalugo sits down with Irina Chuchkina, Chief Growth Officer at Wallet in Telegram, the only wallet natively integrated into a billion-user messenger, and a 20-year payments veteran who launched GrabPay across eight countries in Southeast Asia. They unpack why "distribution is an outcome, not a strategy" w...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, host Chuk Okpalugo sits down with Kirill Gertman, co-founder and CEO of Conduit, the cross-border payments orchestrator building stablecoin infrastructure across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. They unpack why the stablecoin sandwich is actually a "spaghetti-filled taco" — where chain selection, local rail...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Davi Strazza, Chief Business Officer at Lightspark, an 11-year Adyen veteran who helped grow the company from $30B to over $1.3T in payments volume before joining a 50-person startup building on Bitcoin rails. They unpack why Davi believes the moment to rebuild payments infrastr...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering for Coinbase's Developer Platform and the creator of x402 — the open payment protocol that just joined the Linux Foundation with Google, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, and Cloudflare as founding members. They unpack why Erik designed x402 to capt...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Sam Broner, co-founder and CEO of the Better Money Company and former investment partner at a16z crypto. They unpack why swapping one stablecoin for another today is like "selling Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars," why fungibility is the missing layer...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In episode 27 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Rowland Berry, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Payoneer, a cross-border payments platform that moves $90B annually for nearly 2 million small businesses across 190+ countries. They unpack what 18 months of evaluating the stablecoin space revealed: where stablecoins genuinely upgra...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Itai Turbahn, founder and CEO of Dynamic (now part of Fireblocks), where his team builds the embedded wallet infrastructure that lets developers spin up global money movement in hours instead of years. They unpack why the world's largest companies are building their own paym...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 25 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Chris Dean, CEO and co-founder at Treasury Prime. They unpack why bank “slowness” is mostly a risk and proof problem, how fintechs actually use banks for deposits/credit/payments, and how stablecoins and newer, tech-first banks will reshape the US banking landscape. Subscribe and...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this Special Edition episode of Money Code we break down MasterCard’s planned acquisition of BVNK and what it signals about stablecoins shifting from a niche rail to mainstream payments infrastructure. We hear why bridging fiat and stablecoins, plus interoperability and compliance, is the real work behind faster global money movement. Subscribe and liste...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with May Zabeneh, SVP and GM of Crypto at PayPal, where she's building the playbook for how a major fintech embeds stablecoins into existing payment infrastructure. They unpack how PayPal enabled stablecoins in millions of wallets and the bets they hope to pay off, how "disrupting yo...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Zach Abrams, co-founder and CEO of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe that grew several multiples in 2025. They unpack why Zach calls himself "the founder equivalent of a child of the Great Depression," how following developers into the "fog of war"...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Ayo Omojola, General Partner at Refract VC, former Cash App banking lead, and organizer of A Very Stable Conference.  They unpack why the biggest stablecoin opportunity isn't in the US, where Chase is "ferocious" and payments feel good enough, but in serving billio...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 21 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Prabhakar Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO at OpenFX. They explain why “instant FX” can’t be achieved with bank API wrappers alone, and how OpenFX combines end-to-end automation, regional liquidity, local rails, and stablecoins as a routing leg to settle large cross-border transfers i...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 20 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Chris Harmse, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK, and Anthony Yim, Co-Founder and CTO at Artemis. They dive into BVNK and Artemis’ new YouGov survey on stablecoin usage to show how demand for “normal payments” is outpacing real-world access, and why the next adoption w...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 19 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Mike Hudack, Co-founder and CEO at Sling Money. They unpack why stablecoins function as a shared ledger layer that turns cross-border payments from a prefunding and reconciliation problem into an interoperability problem, and why the real hard parts become ramps, localization, an...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 18 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Cooper Thompson, Head of Innovation for Embedded Finance and Digital Assets at Fiserv.  They argue that stablecoins won’t replace bank cores but will connect them, and that the real bottleneck for bank adoption is the liability side: if reserves sit in Treasuries or at GSIBs, sta...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 17 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Jess Houlgrave, CEO at WalletConnect. They use the recent Ingenico partnership to unpack what it really takes to scale stablecoin payments at the physical checkout: incentives that move behavior, compliant routing from on-chain to fiat, UX that feels like Web2, and privacy constr...

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.  In episode 16 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Joao Del Valle, CEO and Co-founder at EBANX, and Chris Harmse, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK. They break down why and how EBANX is incorporating stablecoins into its global money movement stack and share views for how to potentially seed non-USD liquidity via toke...