Greg Kidd speaks at XRP Las Vegas 2025 | #325
Also, digital dollars go mainstream on Shopify
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This week:
Greg Kidd speaks at XRP Las Vegas 2025
Digital dollars go mainstream on Shopify
Stuff happens
1. Greg speaks at XRP Las Vegas 2025
USBC co-founder and former Ripple Chief Risk Officer Greg Kidd spoke at XRP Las Vegas 2025 on May 31st, where he spoke about his vision to digitize U.S. dollars by tokenizing bank deposits. He also covered Trump’s proposed 5 percent remittance tax, his principles around fair access and open banking, and his view of crypto as a treasury play for public companies.
Here’s Greg on tokenized deposits:
What banks do that's different is banks take that money and they put it to work. They use it for credit formation. So if the whole world went to stablecoins, there would be no credit in the world because everything would be backed one for one. You couldn't lend it out. So we use the same technology as a stablecoin, but we're eight times more capital efficient because we can put that money to work.
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And so we can pay interest and we can obviously give that to the end user, but we can also share it with all the other developers and folks. So it's an ecosystem that pays interest, has insurance, and has consumer protections. Again, we will have cross liquidity with stablecoins.
On Ripple’s impact for the industry:
There has been a lot of education and it has been a journey. And I know it looked pretty dark at times—and Ripple was alone at the timde. But I think the whole industry, all of us, pay a real debt of gratitude to [Ripple and Ripple executives] for basically taking that risk on personally and as a firm. And it really has made the alignment of the planets today possible.
You can watch that fireside chat here:
2. Digital dollars go mainstream on Shopify
Here’s Coindesk (via Mitja Simcic):
E-commerce giant Shopify (SHOP) is bringing stablecoin payments to its merchants over Base, crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN)'s Ethereum layer-2 network, the companies said on Thursday.
The integration is set to roll out on June 12 to a limited group of early access merchants, with broader availability expected later this year for all merchants using Shopify Payments, the companies said.
Once the rollout is complete, merchants will be able to accept payments of Circle's (CRCL) USDC token on-chain while receiving local currency settlements without incurring foreign transaction fees. Shopify said it plans to give 1% cash back to customers who pay with USDC. This feature that will launch later in the year.
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The new initiative is designed to streamline global commerce with crypto-native infrastructure, lowering costs and boosting efficiency, and is underpinned by a new open-source payments protocol jointly developed by Coinbase and Shopify.
The smart contract and commerce payments protocol supports standard features such as delayed capture, tax calculation and refund processing, and is integrated directly into merchants’ existing order fulfillment systems, the companies said.
3. Stuff happens
SEC Chair Paul Atkins says the right to self-custody is a 'foundational American value'
Peter Thiel-backed crypto exchange Bullish files for US IPO: FT
US Senate votes to move forward with GENIUS Act as stablecoin legislation picks up speed
Tether acquires 32% stake in Canadian gold-focused firm Elemental for $89 million
GameStop shares tank on convertible bond offering to potentially buy more bitcoin