Podcast: Why the Biggest Market in the World Is Money. And Up for Grabs

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Stablecoins have long promised a cleaner, faster financial system. What they have lacked is a convincing bridge to the world people and businesses already use.

In the latest episode of the “From the Block” podcast with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Ryan Rugg, the global head of digital assets for Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, sat down with Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain, to unpack why the future of digital money is being argued not in ideological terms, but in operational ones.

Who can make value move faster, more safely, and with less friction? Who can do it across weekends, across borders, and across regulatory regimes? And who can make all that complexity invisible to the end user?

As Webster framed it at the outset, Rain is trying to “turn stablecoins from something you’d hold into something you can spend anywhere,” a deceptively simple proposition that helps explain why investors have poured hundreds of millions into the company.

“The biggest market in the world is actually money,” Malik said. “It’s not an industry vertical, it’s not a segment, it’s just money.”

For him and for Rain, stablecoins and tokenized money are not niche financial instruments searching for use cases; they represent “a wholesale upgrading of the global financial system.”

“We’re still in the very, very early innings,” he added. “I don’t even think the first pitch has been thrown here.”

Can Stablecoins Upgrade Global Finance Without Users Noticing?

Rain’s pitch is that the real opportunity within the stablecoin space is not merely to create another digital asset product, but to build the interoperability layer between tokenized money and the incumbent rails of commerce.

That framing helps explain why the startup has attracted so much capital in such a short period. But the conversation also made clear that the bet investors are making is on infrastructure that can make multiple forms of digital money usable within the same commercial environment. Malik repeatedly resisted the idea that the future will be defined by one winner.

“I don’t think it’s an either-or,” he said of digital assets like stablecoins and tokenized deposits. “I think it’s an and.”

That view aligns with Citi’s approach. Rugg, whose team is building tokenized deposit products for multinational clients, described a similar design philosophy where clients want better money movement outcomes, not the technical complexity of wallets, keys, reconciliation burdens, or bespoke compliance workflows.

“They just actually want the utility,” she said, specifically “the movement 24/7, 365, but not actually to manage the technology themselves.”

Both companies converge on the premise that the real breakthrough is not digital assets themselves, but frictionless money movement embedded in familiar systems.

Rain, Malik said, has built its infrastructure to work across “stablecoins,” “tokenized deposits,” “public chains,” and “private chains,” precisely because regulatory and market outcomes remain unsettled.

Still, the two executives were not making exactly the same case. Malik’s emphasis was on how tokenized money can restore some of the directness of cash while preserving the programmability and speed of modern networks.

“We think that in order to have utility for money, you have to be able to use it,” he said.

Consumers, he argued, do not care about back-end mechanics, only that payments are cheaper, faster and more flexible.

Rugg’s perspective was more institutional. She emphasized controls, simplicity and regulatory continuity.

“Interoperability is key in this market,” Rugg said, paired with “the controls,” “the safety and soundness,” and frameworks that forward-thinking clients already trust.

She described a bank strategy built around optionality, where clients can use tokenized deposits, stablecoins or both, so long as the experience is seamless and properly governed.

Stablecoin Utility and Blockchain’s Regulatory Divide

Discussing regulation, Webster posed a central question: If the user experience converges across stablecoins and tokenized deposits, what advantage remains for stablecoins given regulatory uncertainty?

Rugg’s answer was pragmatic. Stablecoins are useful, she said, if their complexity is hidden. She described earlier efforts to pay suppliers in USDC, which required navigating legal and compliance hurdles. The goal now is to “obfuscate that complexity,” so transactions feel like “cash for cash” rather than crypto workflows, she said.

After all, for large corporates managing operational risk, that abstraction may matter as much as speed.

Malik, by contrast, warned against prematurely forcing different instruments into the same regulatory framework. He was careful to stress that his comments were not an argument for light-touch oversight, and underscored that Rain complies with know-your-customer and reporting requirements; but argued that use cases differ and should not be flattened too quickly.

“Sometimes letting the clock run is actually the thoughtful thing to do,” Malik said, pointing to the early internet.

Webster, in response, noted stablecoins’ ongoing association with illicit finance risks and the difficulty of assigning liability.

For her part, Rugg underscored that consistent controls are foundational, especially as new rails emerge.

“Same activity, same risk, same regulation,” she said, noting that digital assets should not aim to remake the regulatory perimeter, but that they should modernize money movement within it.

For all the sector’s noise about disruption and replacement, a more durable approach may be one centered on building connective tissue.

Where Stablecoins Get Compelling

Webster worked to pull the conversation back to adoption, prodding both executives to translate technical architecture into commercial reality.

“What is the structural advantage of stablecoins?” she asked, noting separately that while federal clarity may arrive in the U.S., state-by-state fragmentation could still create major friction.

Malik’s response was that Rain’s real-world volume is already showing that stablecoin-based access to dollars is becoming meaningful not only for crypto-native users, but for global users trying to transact with the U.S. economy.

“We’re the first company ever to settle a payment transaction on a holiday with Visa,” he said, adding that looking at Rain’s own transaction data can help suggest where tokenized money may already be outperforming legacy systems.

The built-in seven-day settlement capability of digital assets, he added, can have an immediate balance-sheet effect. Whereas traditional rails may require several dollars of working capital for each dollar of volume because of settlement timing and weekend risk, Rain’s stablecoin offerings can operate with dramatically less. The result is not just technical novelty, but potentially better unit economics for payment and credit programs.

And if infrastructure becomes “cheaper and more flexible,” Malik said, institutions may be better positioned to serve customers previously considered “too expensive.”

By the end of the discussion, the most revealing issue was ultimately not whether stablecoins will survive, but what kind of market structure could emerge around them.

Malik portrayed Rain as a neutral interoperability layer, “a money business” rather than “a stablecoin company.”

“It’s all about interoperability and how we provide that in a seamless way for our clients,” Rugg said.