Deel’s Thierry Edde on stablecoin payroll and privacy

The show’s first interview. Thierry explains that Deel launched its first stablecoin product about three years ago, because contractors in Latin America wanted access to US dollars rather than local payment rails, and Swift was the only obvious route. It grew to a few million dollars a month. In Argentina, interviews showed that contractors went through several hops after withdrawing before they could spend their pay. That led to the wallet Deel launched in June, where contractors hold dollar value and earn rewards, with spending from the balance coming next.

Since June, Thierry says, 95 percent of the volume that enters the wallet goes straight into the earn vaults, though he allows that may be partly because there is no card yet. Dan didn’t expect earn programs to be the main driver of stablecoin adoption, but says they clearly have product-market fit.

On privacy, Thierry says the benefits of blockchains, like settlement around the clock with no bank holidays, can never come at the cost of privacy for a payroll company: a person’s financial information should not be public. Deel is the first company in production on Tempo Zones. He credits Deel’s speed to a culture of moving fast for customers and a lean crypto team that had to learn crypto from scratch. Next are a card for spending from the balance, a fuller neobank experience for contractors in emerging markets, and in 2027 possibly the wallet for full-time employees, which he calls a much harder compliance problem.

Simon joins for the news, starting with JPMorgan blocking outside AI agents such as Meta’s Muse from customer accounts. Dan points out that Mercury let ChatGPT and Claude act on its accounts the same week. He expects the companies that lean into agents to win customers who use them, and thinks agents using a browser may soon be impossible to tell from people anyway. Simon says blocking costs JPMorgan little and cuts fraud, at the price of a marginal early adopter. He thinks banks are refighting the screen-scraping battles of open banking, and want agents to identify themselves and the person they act for. Linking an agent to a person and to that person’s intent is still unsolved, and the protocols trying to do it are crowded.

Dan argues that privacy is becoming a requirement because AI makes public chains easy to read: an AI model categorized activity on Tempo without specialist analytics tools. Before Zones it could have mapped Deel’s wallets, and now it sees only aggregate numbers. Simon says enterprises like Zones because they’re simple to understand, much like a virtual private cloud: no esoteric cryptography, still auditable for regulators, and familiar to anyone who has built on Ethereum.

Finally, Mastercard and BVNK launched the Global Money Platform, which puts stablecoin and fiat accounts and local bank payouts behind one API. Simon says it tackles the hard last mile of off-ramping, and makes stablecoins just another rail, which he considers a good thing. Dan admits he was wrong about the card networks: Visa and Mastercard are taking stablecoins more seriously, at the product level, than he expected. Within 12 to 18 months, he thinks, stablecoins could move money from point to point with the card networks as the exits.