Building Onchain Global Venmo Ft. Sling Money CEO Mike Hudack
Oct 7, 2024
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Mike Hudack, Co-founder of Sling Money and ex-leader at Monzo and Meta, shares his insights on revolutionizing money transfers. He discusses the necessity of a streamlined user experience with stablecoins and addresses the challenges of compliance in crypto transactions. Hudack highlights how traditional banks are embracing digital currencies, particularly Societe Generale's launch of a euro-backed stablecoin on Solana. He also emphasizes the potential of blockchain to simplify global payments while fostering trust and regulatory frameworks in fintech.
Sling Money aims to simplify the user experience in crypto by eliminating complex wallet requirements to encourage mainstream adoption.
The platform prioritizes regulatory compliance from the start, ensuring safety and trust to enhance long-term success in the financial landscape.
Deep dives
The Vision for Sling Money
Sling Money aims to create a global peer-to-peer payment system akin to Venmo, facilitating instant and inexpensive transactions across borders. The founders believe that leveraging stablecoins and swift blockchains enables a seamless experience for users, removing complex barriers often associated with traditional banking. The goal is to build a service that is not only user-friendly but also trustworthy, allowing users to send money without worrying about the payment process. This approach is driven by the belief that financial interactions should be as simple as sending a text message.
Challenges in Traditional Payment Systems
The traditional payment infrastructure faces significant challenges, particularly with respect to compliance and user experience. The founder shared personal experiences highlighting the difficulties encountered when sending stablecoins through complex wallets and networks, which can be daunting for mainstream users. This complexity often drives potential users away, which inspired Sling Money to abstract these challenges, allowing users to send money to individuals rather than cumbersome wallet addresses. By streamlining the process, Sling aims to facilitate adoption and encourage more users to engage with the service.
Building Compliance from the Ground Up
Sling Money prioritizes regulatory compliance and safety, designing its financial operations with a focus on meeting regulatory standards from the outset. The team emphasizes the importance of establishing a robust compliance infrastructure to avoid issues that could arise from lax practices in the future. By collaborating with experts in regulatory processes, Sling seeks to ensure that its operations align with legal requirements, thereby gaining users’ trust. This foundational approach is viewed as critical to the long-term success and stability of the platform in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.
The Future of Stablecoins and On-Chain Transactions
The discussion highlights the transformative potential of stablecoins in creating a new, efficient financial ecosystem that can seamlessly bridge different currencies and regions. By utilizing stablecoins and advanced blockchain technology, Sling Money aspires to build features that enable instant foreign exchanges and real-time transactions across borders, fundamentally redefining how money moves globally. The awareness and acceptance of these technologies among banks and users are expected to grow, fostering a more integrated financial landscape. As the industry evolves, the focus will be on ensuring that the user experience remains straightforward and intuitive, similar to using standard financial products.
On Ep. 8 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Mike Hudack, Co-Founder @ Sling Money. Mike talks to Tokenized about how his time at Monzo, Meta and Deliveroo influenced Sling Money's rise into one of the best crypto experiences on the planet.
Timestamps:
01:53 What is Sling Money?
05:16 Creating a useable experience sending stablecoins
07:20 Compliance infrastructure & technology
12:58 Multi-currency experience
16:02 Why is the user experience in crypto so poor?
18:00 Gas abstraction
21:56 Who should be thinking about this space?
26:09 SG Forge rollout Euro CoinVertible on Solana
30:03 Why Solana?
30:52 MiCA & regulation
31:34 On-chain FX
37:12 Stablecoin native exchange TrueX
40:33 What's the vision for Sling Money?
This episode is brought to you by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto
Visa’s Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies onchain. VTAP allows financial institutions to issue fiat-backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. Express interest in VTAP atglobalclient.visa.com/vtap
This podcast is also supported by Digital Asset.
Digital Asset is excited to launch the Canton Network, a proven, trusted, and scaleable service that provides interoperability between institutional-grade tokenization platforms. The Global Synchronizer is now live, managed by Linux and institutions are actively using Canton Coin to manage the governance. No, the banks haven’t launched a token in the classic sense, this is much more interesting. They’ve done it to make all token networks interoperable. Find out more at canton.network
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