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Zebec x Algorand: RWA and Payments Edition 💵
Recorded: July 24, 2025 Duration: 0:27:28Space Recording
Short Summary
Sebex and Algorand are forging a groundbreaking partnership to revolutionize payroll systems through blockchain technology, with plans to launch a tokenized payroll solution using USDC. This collaboration highlights the increasing regulatory engagement in the crypto space, particularly in the UK, as governments begin to embrace stablecoins and their potential impact on financial systems.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All right.
Mic check, mic check.
Chris, can you see if you can hear me?
Yeah.
Can you hear me now?
Perfect.
Loud and clear.
Okay.
Beautiful.
So let me make sure Simon and Mark are uh are you guys listening to me fine
guys yep absolutely i'm here hey how are you great to have you guys okay all right so before
uh i guess we can kick it off right simon or are we waiting yes let's let's kick it off we only
have 30 minutes today and we want to go through a lot of great content.
Shall I stop? Yeah, so before we start, today we got, well, what's up everybody? Thank you for joining today on, you know, this Thursday.
Today we got a super special Spaces and we got a special host today, a former editor for the independent major publication in London.
Chris, so happy to have you on and I'll give it to you. Take it over.
Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Blackhurst.
Look, I'm delighted to be hosting the Sebex Spaces, focusing on RWA Momentum in Web3,
Sebex's evolving role and Algorand's position in the market.
Look, let's start at the beginning because this is hugely important.
Simon, I understand you recently spoke at the British House of Lords.
How cool is that? How was it?
First of all, thank you for everyone for joining.
And thank you, Chris, for graciously
hosting this space and Mark from Algorand as well. We're very much looking forward to your
contribution to this discussion. So yes, we did have the honour of speaking in the House of
Parliament in Westminster. The conversation was around regulation and corporate compliance. We're
very much looking forward to coming back
and contributing to the work of Baroness Susan Kramer and her team around the upcoming stable
coin policy here in the UK. And was it a case of new tech meeting the old? I mean,
were you very comfy in those surroundings? Well, look, it was a bit out of our element
as a technology company to be up there
with government officials. But I think there was a lot to be learned from both sides.
All right. Brilliant. Listen, moving on to the topic of today, we're going to talk real world
assets or RWAs and how they've become one of the loudest narratives in the space.
Why? Why do you think that is? It's a great question. I mean, there's
been a lot of buzz around RWAs recently in the past couple of months. I mean, I think you have
to really bring it back to the beginning of crypto. Crypto has been searching for use cases for well
over a decade. And now with the largest economy in the world blessing stablecoins and tokenization
technology, we are ready to see Wall Street move aggressively
into the space, bridging the gap between TradFi and DeFi.
Asset tokenization of RWAs lets investors from around the world participate in markets
that they may not have had access to in this traditional structure.
So it makes investments a lot more accessible and democratized, very similar to the ethos
of Zbeck's approach to
streaming finance and unlocking the value that exists in payroll. So what role do you see Zbeck
playing in that evolution? So Zbeck's history has really been around stablecoin payroll. We're the
market leader in the space and we pioneered the technology nearly four years ago, when the market was not even talking about this use case at all. Payroll is the foundation of a lot of our
products, and at Zenec, we're driving millions of dollars in new volume entering the crypto space
as employees increasingly elect to take part of their salary in digital assets, namely stablecoins.
in digital assets, namely stablecoins. This then opens up these users to a world of possibilities
within DeFi or simply reinvesting their payroll into major assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum,
no different than how many Americans may invest part of their earnings into a stock portfolio
through a 401k deduction. What's even more exciting is the prospect of connecting the payroll flow to this
huge arena of tokenized real world assets, which are growing by the month. And this then allows
employees to expand their investments far beyond the basic crypto digital assets
into a variety of RWAs through an on-chain transfer or even a DCA contract. So we're super, super excited to
have Algorand as a key partner for us on this flow. Obviously, this announcement was made today,
so it's very, very fresh. We're going to get into some more details on the space.
As we truly believe that the Algorand network is set up extremely well to handle large volumes of
payroll transactions. And it is, of course, the largest platform for RWA
tokenization out there in the market today. Well, that's great. I mean, let's talk about
our guests. We're going to talk Algorand, L1, Billions and TVL, ISO, 2022 compliant,
making a huge impression in the RWA space. Simon, can you introduce our guests?
Absolutely. Well, welcome Mark Vandlerberg, who's the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer
from the Algorand Foundation. It's a real pleasure to have you on our spaces today, Mark.
Thanks, Mark. So glad to be here. Mark, Mark, hello. Hello. Hi, Chris.
Listen, when it comes to RWAs, there are a handful of L1s trying to claim that narrative.
Why does Algorand stand out from the rest?
Yeah, well, maybe for your listeners that may not all be familiar with Algorand, let me do a very quick intro on Algorand.
So Algorand is a layer one blockchain, as he mentioned,
and has been around for more than six years.
And it was founded by a Turing Award winner, Silvio Micali.
And the key innovation that Silvio came up with was a new, very elegant consensus mechanism
that is super, super lightweight
and that uses kind of a lottery system as its basis.
And the result of that mechanism is
that we have a chain that is highly scalable highly decentralized and is highly secure at the
same time and so the chain currently can cover over 10 000 transactions per second anyone can
run a node you can stake as little as one algo and you can run a node on a mini computer mini pc
which you can rarely do on any other chain and it's highly
secure at the same time and so the chain has really been built from the start for real world use cases
and we have features such as instant finality which basically allows users to kind of instantly
settle transactions on chain and very low and predictable fees and so and so this kind of
technical underpinning
makes the chain extremely well suited
for tokenization use cases.
And we've seen many, many examples,
as you mentioned,
I'm going to be an early mover in this space.
We've seen many, many examples on chain
of tokenized assets, equities,
like the first people talk now about equities all the time,
but the first stock that was ever tokenized
on a blockchain was the Exodus stock and is tokenized on algorithms.
We have money market funds. We have U.S. treasuries. Gold is being tokenized.
We have a very interesting company called Lofty that is tokenizing real estate on chain.
And we also have tokenization of non-financial products.
Like, for instance, we worked with the big energy provider, Enel,
to tokenize solar panels.
So users can actually buy a solar panel without having to install the panel on their roof, and they get all the benefits
without all the hassle associated with it.
Oh, wow, that's amazing.
Look, Mark, is Algorand's ISO 2022 compliance an enterprise-ready architecture?
Is that the real differentiator?
Or is it these partnerships that you're building?
Well, I think it's a combination of factors.
The ISO compliance, of course, is very important.
And we are actually one of only a handful of botchains that are compliant.
And so the U.S. US Treasury via the Federal Reserve is now
implementing this ISO standard as the global messaging standard for like Fedwire fund service.
And so being part of that standard and being compliant with that standard, of course, is very,
very important and very critical. The second piece is like the enterprise-ready architecture.
It's really important because you don't want to tokenize on Quicksand, right?
And so, for instance, our ledger today is one of the few ledgers out there
that is quantum secure.
And if you're thinking about tokenizing treasuries,
and if you're like a government, you're not thinking 5, 10 years in advance,
you're thinking 50, 100 years in advance.
And you want to make sure that whatever you tokenize on chain
will still be secure when quantum computers hit.
And so that's what we have today.
The chain is kind of quantum secure today from a ledger perspective.
But of course, none of this really matters if you don't have the right
partnerships at the same time, because, you know, it's companies like Zipec
that make the magic happen for users, right?
We are just the kind of infrastructure layer below it.
We make sure everything kind of runs properly and there's no
downtime and it's secure and it's safe but ultimately what drives the usage is the companies
like ZitBac who basically build services on top of it that make the blockchain sink.
That's really the magic of this partnership is you're bringing really the top tier infrastructure
layer in the market of Algorand with the real world users of Zbeck coming together.
It sounds great. I love the word magic and infrastructure and people working together
to make things happen. It sounds brilliant. Simon, listen, people talk about tokenizing
buildings, cars, treasuries. What does it look like when you actually tokenize payroll? How
people are paid? How does that look like? How does it look like when you tokenize payroll itself?
is there's really two elements to it.
So the first is what most people think of payroll,
which is with a tokenized payroll,
which is essentially using a tokenized form
of the US dollar or other fiat equivalent
to make the payroll transaction.
This is what we've been building for years
and will soon be expanding to the Algorand network,
initially with the USDC stable coin, of course, from Circle,
but on the Algorand network.
So that is a project that
we're launching now with this partnership. And then the second aspect of payroll tokenization
is a much more nascent concept, and it involves the earned wage access industry, which is primarily
in the US and some parts of Europe. Earned wage access, or EWA, it's a program that lets employees
receive a portion of their paycheck in advance of payday with a fee.
Although this is the very concept that streaming payroll technology and crypto solves for in a much cheaper and more efficient way,
Earned Wage Access remains used in certain areas of the economy, particularly with lower wage jobs, hourly jobs, where they also don't have as much adoption of crypto payroll.
jobs, hourly jobs, where they also don't have as much adoption of crypto payroll.
So EWA providers, they sit on large payroll receivables that bear yield in the form of
access fees that are paid by employees.
And these assets can be tokenized on chain in the same manner that treasuries or other
debt instruments can be brought on chain.
So this has never been done before, but this is a concept that we are exploring now actively.
So through Zbeck's very own WageLink application, which is processing earned wage access transactions for
payroll clients of Paybridge and other partner companies of ours, we are exploring the very
first tokenization of such assets on-chain through the Algorand network. So this is a great example
of a completely new asset class that fits within the credit category coming on chain.
It connects to our existing payroll business and our existing payroll flows and opens up a whole
new yield opportunity to investors that may want to diversify out of standard credit investments.
It sounds fantastic. I want it. I want it. The idea of getting paid in advance. Oh, God.
Right. Simon, what makes Algorand the right chain for EWA partnership?
So Algorand has a feature called Atomic Swaps that essentially let you simultaneously settle a payment for an asset with the delivery of the asset at the same time, all within a single transaction.
So this effectively reduces any counterparty risk that you have and it creates a trustless
environment for the trading of assets. But I'm sure you know
Mark can contribute to this at a much deeper level than I can.
Mark, do you want to go deeper?
Yeah, atomic swaps. I mean, atomic swaps are absolutely, Simon did
a great job of explaining it, absolutely a key feature here.
And this is just one of the features that make Algorithm really enterprise-ready
and enterprise-great.
And it's a core feature in any kind of financial transactions because, as Simon
said, it eliminates any counterparty risk and it makes sure that payments get
settled instantly on chain and
specifically in the context of for instance debit card this is also a critical feature
you could actually run a debit card with a fully on-chain balance management you don't have to do
anything off chain all the balances can be on chain you can actually top up or like do any kind
of actions with your debit card on chainchain because of this instant finality feature.
If you don't have that,
then you always have to have a secondary ledger
that keeps track of the balances
because you can't trust the ledger to do it.
But with an instant finality environment,
you can actually manage everything on-chain
and make it free, transparent, and visible.
And so it's a great enabler
for a whole series of financial use cases.
Can we talk a bit about the debit card?
How does that work?
Yeah, so we actually recently launched on the Zabek card suite
the integration of the Algo token.
So this is now live on our silver and our carbon card,
meaning that users can now spend Algorand in the real world
in fiat currency with minimal to no fees.
So that is a really exciting development that we encourage the community of both Zabek and Algorand
to check out. And I think this is really where like where really crypto will go in my view will
go mainstream, right? Because one of the big issues of crypto is both the on-ramping and the
off-ramping. If you basically solve the on-ramping through payroll, right, and you solve the off-ramping and the off-ramping. If you basically solve the on-ramping through payroll, right,
and you solve the off-ramping through debit cards,
then you basically have no reason not to have your life completely on-chain.
Wow, wow.
So, Mark, what stablecoins are being built on or integrated with Algorand?
So, the primary stablecoin that is used predominantly on Algorand is USDC,
Circles USDC.
Besides USDC, we have a number of other stablecoins,
specifically Eurodonomia stablecoins.
We have Eurod, which is a stablecoin that's focused more on payments.
We have EuroQ and USDQ, which are also European stablecoins
that are managed and issued by Quantos,
a European company.
All of these stablecoins are fully MECAR compliant.
And there's more stablecoins coming
because we just signed a partnership with Wormhole NTT
that allows for cross-chain transfers of tokens
and make it easy for stablecoin providers
to issue stablecoins on Algorand
and have them transfer in and out of Algorand. So there's more coming.
What about the stablecoins that Zempec will be integrating? Can we talk about those?
Yes, so as we mentioned earlier we will be integrating USDC of course from one
of our backers and early investors Circle but on the Algorand network that
will be coming to our cards as well as our payroll tools. And from there, we're looking at integrating new stable
coins, which we've discussed in previous spaces, potentially as well as some non-USD-pegged
stable coins, such as the one that Mark mentioned as well, for serving the European markets.
Wow, wow. Simon, you've been tapped by the UK government around stables.
What are they asking you?
What's Sebex's point of view on how governments should approach stablecoin policy?
How do you work with them?
We can't go into a ton of detail there on our involvement, but we are looking to some of the legislation that's
been coming out of the US as a guidepost for the UK, while taking into account the policies,
priorities of the UK to keep the pound globally competitive as a major trading currency.
So we're really excited to be part of these upcoming conversations here in the UK. It's
really a signal of our commitment to the market. Of course, we've made a number of acquisitions here this year,
and we are aggressively growing our business in this market. But of course, the US has been the
first mover when it comes to stablecoin policy, which is great to see, given the majority of
Zbeck's payroll business exists in the US and we are now expecting to see much higher conversion
rates into stablecoin payroll. Given you have many banks that are signing on to the Genius Act,
they're now able to process stablecoin transactions and work in close unison with payroll companies.
I have to say this as a Brit in London, not far away from the headquarters of the British government.
How far behind are they? I mean, do they really get it? Can we see it soon?
That's a great question. I think the UK takes a little bit more wait-and-see approach and a little bit more cautious.
We've done it through history, guys. That's what we do.
We're always last to the party.
Absolutely. There's definitely reasons why that measured and slower approach can make sense.
All right. Well, I'm pleased about that.
We are there, are we we're actually
you know we're in the space and we're catching up
exactly what's interesting is i just read an article yesterday that appeared in the economist
and and under the title crypto's big bang Revolutionize Finance. This is probably the first positive article I've seen The Economist write about crypto.
So that's the sign of the times.
That's a huge breakthrough.
They're normally very cynical about anything.
They really are cautious, but they probe and they challenge and they take a view and it's not often the right view.
And the whole article is about stablecoins and tokenization.
That's what it's about. And so they are seeing the future
and it's unfolding in front of us.
And do you think Big Bang is an exaggeration?
I mean, do you really feel that's what we're heading towards?
I think also with the regulation
that's changing in the US,
with regulators being much more open
and more innovation driven,
I think we'll see major changes.
Yes, we'll see major changes.
Whether I'd call it a big bang,
I don't know,
but we'll definitely see major changes
and I think crypto will become
far more mainstream
as a result of this.
And to come back to something you said earlier, I mean, this is really the, it's sort of the tipping point, isn't it?
I mean, if you get paid this way, then there's really no excuse.
I mean, you're in there, you're in the space.
And it's really how most people are now going to embrace crypto.
Yeah, and I think the way crypto should work
is that your money should always work for you.
Like, let's say you get paid directly in USDC.
That money, the moment it's in your wallet,
it should work for you.
It should generate yield, right?
And that's possible in a crypto environment.
It's very hard to get that done in a traditional finance environment.
And that's, I think, the world where we're going towards
is that your money that you have
will always work for you every second of the day.
And I think that's how it's supposed to be.
And that's exactly the ethos
of our real-time finance movement as a background.
I mean, we were founded to make payroll
and other streams of value in the economy happen in real time. So as you background. I mean, we were founded to make payroll and other streams of value
in the economy happen in real time. So as you're receiving your payroll, you're also relatively
reinvesting a portion of it. You're earning a yield in a portion. It all works kind of like
clockwork. And look, I have to ask this because I'm not, you know, it is safe, isn't it? I mean, you are going to be asked that
question time and time again, probably by governments and by companies, everyone using it.
It is safe. It's secure, isn't it? Well, it is. It is. I mean, if you think about it,
if you think about Bitcoin, for instance, there's no bigger, you know, honeypot available anywhere
in the world for somebody to try and hack, you know, Bitcoin system.
Nobody's been able to do it. There's like two or three trillion dollars sitting there for anybody who can successfully hack.
Don't lay down the challenge now.
Right. It's like people listening and think, right, I'm going to prove you wrong.
Yeah, well, exactly.
Don't go there.
They've been trying. I think they've been trying for many years.
All of these blockchains, they're cryptographically secure and so um so it is 100 secure now of course
there is by moving into a self-custody environment where you kind of control your own money
that comes with challenges as well right you can't call your bank anymore when, you know, when you've lost your passport, your password, right?
Because there's no bank to control your password.
So you do have personal responsibilities to make sure
that you keep the secrets and keep your passwords
or your secret keys, your private keys.
You have to make, you have to keep them secure.
And if you lose them, you know,
there's risks associated with that.
And so there are challenges of like this whole kind of self custody environment, and that that will require, you know,
consumer education, but the blockchain of itself is highly secure, highly secure.
And I would I would add here that I mean, stable coins now are seeing a huge leap up in transparency
and backing, given that we're going to see so much more transaction volume
occurring on stable coins,
it was important for the government
to come in and say,
well, these are the rules.
They have to be backed by,
you know, dollar equivalents
or short-dated treasuries
to ensure that there's trust in the system.
Yeah, I mean, that's really the difference, isn't it?
I mean, the fact is it's now stable.
It's backed, whether it's by the difference, isn't it? I mean, the fact is it's now stable. It's backed,
whether it's by the dollar, it might soon be backed by the British pound. I mean,
these are huge, huge developments, aren't they?
Absolutely. I mean, it's an incredibly exciting time for our industry and for anyone that's building right now in the blockchain. Gosh, gosh, I'm in the wrong space. And what's the timeline
here? Are you able to put a timeline on how soon, I don't want to hold you to this, but
how soon can we expect Big Bang? I think, you know, I think it's happening as we speak, right? I think more and more,
I think to me, like the regulatory clarity unlocks a bunch of things. Like the Genius
Act was just approved in the US last week. So that is a massive unlock, right? I think you'll
see a large number of players like moving into thecoin space, and that will drive tremendous usage.
So I think you'll start seeing this happen over the next couple of months.
I think it'll happen very, very quickly.
I agree. I think it's going to happen a lot sooner than people think.
Just give me an example.
I mean, we've had multiple companies reaching out to us
since the Genius Act looking for stablecoin payroll.
This even includes publicly
listed companies in the US. So we had never seen that during the years that we were kind of
building without this regulatory clarity. So it's really refreshing to see.
Oh, it sounds. And final question. I mean, will there be a defining moment? I mean,
is there a moment we should look out for
or are we through that?
It's now about volume.
I think this defining moment is when Zerbeck launches on Algorand.
Great answer.
That is the real big bang there.
Well, listen, guys, look, it's all very exciting stuff.
We're really looking forward to seeing how this partnership develops.
And I want to say thank you to both Simon and Mark for their answers today.
Thanks to everyone that listened in.
We'll be back soon and take care.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you, Mark.
