Payments Ep #58

<p>In this special Payments episode of the Solana Podcast, Austin Federa guest hosts a conversation between Jeremy Allaire (CEO, Circle) and Sheraz Shere (Head of Payments, Solana Labs). They discuss merchant payments, stablecoins and Solana Pay: the newly released, open, and free-to-use payments framework built on Solana.</p><p>00:45 - What is Circle?<br />03:35 -  The use case for stablecoins and the mechanisms to build them<br />09:34 - Solana Pay<br />13:42 - Integration of USDC and Stable Coins<br />18:45 - How could Solana Pay become mainstream? <br />25:27 - The Solana Pay toolkit<br />27:39 - Can businesses operate without a bank account?<br />30:05 - Looking at Data Privacy in Solana Pay and Circle <br />34:35 - Hopes for Solana hackathon outcomes</p><p> </p><p>Austin: (00:09)</p><p><br />Hello and welcome to the Solana podcast. I’m Austin Federa guest hosting this week. Today we're going to be talking about stablecoins, USDC and Solana pay. So we're joined today by Sheraz Shere, the head of payments at Solana labs and Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle. Welcome to the show.</p><p>Jeremy: (00:27)</p><p>Thank you.</p><p>Sheraz: (00:27)</p><p>Thanks Austin.</p><p>Austin: (00:28)</p><p>Great. Well, let's start off with Jeremy, talk a little bit about Circle. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Circle and what's its role in the US DC stablecoin?</p><p>Jeremy: (00:37)</p><p>Sure, absolutely. So Circle is a global financial technology firm. We operate a suite of services to help businesses take advantage of digital currency in payments and treasury applications on the internet, which is all really a mouthful. But specifically we have a couple of really critical things. The first is we operate a stablecoin market infrastructure as we call it called USDC, and we'll talk, I know more about that, but USDC is a dollar digital currency that is an asset backed or fully reserved digital currency that can be used for payments and settlement on the internet. And it's already used really, really widely in the crypt