Tomer Weller | You Can Move Millions Without a Bank. He Already Did.

Jun 3, 2025

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On today’s Talking Tokens episode, Jacquelyn sat down with Tomer Weller, Chief Product Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. Stellar is a blockchain network focused on real-world financial use cases — from cross-border payments to tokenized treasuries — and has quietly built one of the strongest infrastructures in emerging markets like Latin America and Africa, including a major partnership with MoneyGram.They discuss Stellar’s evolution over the past 11 years, why it chose to stay mission-aligned while others chased hype, and how it’s enabling native crypto-to-cash flows, seamless DeFi access, and developer-friendly smart contracts with Soroban. Tomer also shares his take on Web3 product design, the future of privacy, and what it takes to earn institutional trust.

Timestamps

(0:00) - Intro
(1:01) - Tomer’s background & joining Stellar
(2:33) - How Stellar has evolved over the years
(5:18) - Cross-border payments & MoneyGram integration
(8:06) - UX: Making crypto invisible to users
(11:46) - What makes a bad Web3 product
(13:16) - Why security needs to come first
(15:02) - Soroban & Stellar’s smart contracts vision
(20:27) - Governance, validators & institutional trust
(26:28) - Why developers choose to build on Stellar
(27:32) - DeFi + RWAs: New frontier for tokenization
(30:02) - What institutions want next: Privacy

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