Solving Stablecoin Fragmentation with Eco feat. CEO Ryne Saxe

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm excited to welcome Ryne Saxe, who is the CEO of Eco. So if you didn't know, Eco is the stablecoin network that makes money programmable across many different blockchains. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Ryne, learn about Eco, how they're solving the stablecoin fragmentation problem across chains, and how you can get started building with them today. All right, gang. Let's get into it.

GM GM, welcome to the show, Ryne. I'm excited to have you on today, man.

Hey, Narb. Glad to be here, glad to... you're willing to have Eco back on. I think Shariq was with you several months ago, and so I'm happy to take the seat myself today.

Yes, yes. Yeah, that was a fantastic episode. We learned a lot there and excited for the gang watching today to get an updated view and outlook from yourself. And thank you so much for taking the time on a Friday to come chat with us. I really appreciate that as well.

Happy to chat.

No problem. So I guess for folks who aren't familiar, did you just want to start with an introduction about yourself?

Myself personally?

Yeah, sure thing. Yes.

I lead Eco, co-founder and CEO of Eco. Some people in the audience may or may not be aware we've actually been around for a while. Always about stablecoins, but started the company way back in 2018, which was too soon for stablecoins, and fortunately, we're still here. I sort of got caught with the crypto bug a couple of years before that, and I had a technical background but was actually practicing law at the time, kind of an interim career season. And then crypto captured me and lit the nerd up in me again. And then I was like, 'I got to go back and build.' And worked on a couple of projects, one of which merged with my co-founders and became Eco in the early days. And so we're still here. Happy to say any more about any one of those junctions.

Amazing. Yeah. I'm curious to double click a little bit into your background as a lawyer and you also have a physics background as well. I guess exploring those fields and having the knowledge that you do, like what made you be like, 'Oh, like, I don't want to do this. Crypto and technology is where I want to be'?

I think I knew that before, so, you know, even when I was in the legal field, I was close to tech. Why do tech companies do deals? Why does a big tech company buy a smaller tech company for their product? How do they fold it in? That was kind of what I was a part of on the legal side of things, and I found that super interesting. But my background was more hands-on, more as a builder, and I just kind of had to get back to that eventually. Knew I wanted to start a company or be a part of starting a company that was ambitious, and that became Eco. I think crypto's super interesting. My story, I think, is actually less unique in the crypto field. There are a bunch of people with meandering, non-linear backgrounds. There's even a bunch of technical lawyers in the field from the very early days. And it's interesting to think about why that is. In my opinion, it's because crypto combines these disciplines and interests that are very, very difficult to combine in the same space. So, you know, like cryptography, harder science interests are relevant here, economic interests are relevant here, legal interests are relevant here, and regulatory interests, if you believe and did believe 10 years ago that this technology was inevitably going to break into the mainstream world and touch on those regimes. And so, crypto's fascinating to me because, you know, like 15 years ago, if I wanted to exercise with different interests, I would have to take a different class or read a different book. And in crypto every day for the last, I don't know, eight, nine years, almost every day, all of those interests have been piqued in some decision or something I needed to learn, and I think that kind of self-selects for other people with maybe similar patterns in their background.

Fair enough, fair enough. And yeah, I don't know about you, but like I was gravitated towards crypto and Web3 just because of the tech itself and how cool it was, exciting, the different innovations it would unlock. Now we're kind of seeing the same thing around AI as well. I feel it's kind of that same buzz, that same excitement, a lot of the regulatory things are coming up now for better or worse. I guess like from your perspective, are you kind of in the AI space at all? Or do you have that same kind of urge to kind of get that same learning in around it?

Yeah, I'm surrounded by... I live in San Francisco. And so, it's everywhere. You know, it's funny, people kind of rightfully make fun of San Francisco to speak our own language when it comes to our own tech bubble, and right now, AI is that language. You know, like when things were hot eight, nine years ago, your sort of meet-up threshold question was: 'Where do you work in tech?' Now it's even narrower, it's like: 'Where do you work in AI?' And so, yeah, I'm sort of part of that scene. Our company operates in an increasingly AI-native way. We think that's important for the way we work remotely and for the leverage we get out of each individual person, myself included. And the cooler thing sometimes I like to step back and think about is having worked in crypto for this period of time and then having kind of like been there when AI finally lit up. It's really kind of an interesting privilege. I always envy the guys who were there during the dot-com boom and their stories. A lot of them are still around Silicon Valley, and it's just fascinating to hear about trying to build a company in 1996 with none of the supporting infrastructure, and to build an online business. And some sort of succeeded spectacularly, and many failed spectacularly, and those are fascinating stories to me. And so, I often try to kind of remind myself that I hope 30 years from now, I have the same stories, you know, from the early days of crypto or the early days of AI, even though I'm not working in an AI company, it's sort of in the air I breathe most days right now, and so, close to it.

Yeah, it's certainly a very fortunate time to be somebody in tech and having the opportunity to have these alien tools, as I like to call them, at our disposal just to, yeah, to be able to build anything at a whim. But I guess coming back to crypto and stablecoins, you mentioned you yourself and Eco got into stablecoins and started out with stablecoins way before it was a trend. Right, this year it's very, very hot topic. I guess curious to kind of hear the origin story behind how Eco kind of came together and why, why was it built.

Yeah, so, everybody that was a part of Eco coming together knew something about the world of payments a little more deeply, card processing, e-commerce payments, cross-border payments, some combination of those things. So we knew some things about that stack, and we knew about where that stack was clunky, where it didn't work very well. And to us, crypto was just better money rails, clearly better money rails. Yeah, we all love Bitcoin for its own reasons, but the underlying tech is just fundamentally a better way to move money, and we all just viewed that as an inevitable evolution in how we do move money. Question of when, not if. Of course, back then, everyone was a little bit I think overly optimistic about the when part. And so, we also knew that Bitcoin, Ethereum, the assets themselves weren't very useful as money back then, and we thought they probably wouldn't be. Store of value, compute, whatever, you know, other good uses for those assets, but we were looking at them and we were thinking they're not sort of going to behave very well as money. You need something different. You need this concept, you need some concept of a stablecoin. Now, different theses and different kind of designs back then for what a stablecoin should be. Should it just be a digital dollar? Should it be some other kind of stable value? You know, different theses there. But we started to build infrastructure for this thing, this concept called a stablecoin. We had our own kind of concept for what a digital payment currency might look like, and that was the origin story for Eco. And, you know, as the years have gone by, the kind of new payment currency, different type of online payment currency concept went by the wayside and the infrastructure is what we focused on and what won out, just to help people adopt and build for the other stablecoins out there that gained traction. And it took a while, it really did, you know, when we started, we thought that the kind of digital payment currency stablecoin usecase would mature within a couple of years. It ended up taking four or five years. Fortunately, we kind of found our way through it. And now it's actually taking off faster than I thought it ever would. So it's kind of like we stretched the rubber band for a few extra years on 'when would this actually happen?' and finally it snapped and it's all taking off at once, and hopefully we can do our part.

Yeah, yeah, you guys certainly... you picked the winner, I think. I think stablecoins, like you mentioned, they're so important now, and I think they're going to be way more important as the years go by. I still don't know if humans will use stablecoins predominantly. I am more bullish, so to speak, on AI agents using stablecoins or crypto in general to pay for things. But we're kind of seeing that kind of unfold this year, and, yeah, we'll see where it gets to next year. But I guess when you guys were starting with stablecoins, I don't know if you imagined there would be so many chains like there are today, and every chain has their own bridged version of a stablecoin, USDC, USDT, whatever else is there. And one of the big problems Eco solves, as far as I've read, is this fragmentation problem and making it easy for people to basically use stables across all these chains. I guess in your words, like how are you guys fixing that fragmentation problem?

Yeah, so we... there's a few kind of sub-problems within that. And you're right, in the early days like it was still very... the raging debate was how many blockchains are there going to be? You remember that very well. Now it's kind of like the raging debate is how many stablecoins are there going to be? Tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, who knows. The truth is usually somewhere in between. We de-risk being right or wrong about that by only focusing on kind of what we look at as the wholesale market for stablecoins, which is that there are like a single... like fewer than 10 stablecoins driving real volume that we can kind of capture and we trust as durable, and there's fewer than 15 chains that are sort of liquidity sinks for those particular stablecoins, and the routing problem is between those and some longer-tail stables and some longer-tail chains. They ultimately survive the test of time, but we don't really chase those today. So within the fragmentation problem, you know, I think what's unique about Eco is that we have a pretty full-stack expertise on the stablecoin usecase, from the bare metal, kind of on-chain development, to the liquidity problem, to the sort of end-user UX. Intimately related, if you get liquidity wrong, UX breaks. And so, we are effectively a really, really good router for stablecoins. Really good routers are very, very valuable in the world, in trad-fi and that's what we hope to be in the on-chain economy, bridging it with the off-chain economy. Anyone who wants to pass through a stablecoin or has a stablecoin use case and needs to route them between on-chain markets or open markets or between chains themselves, we're usually going to be able to find the best path. The thing that people need to sort of realize about the fragmentation problem statement is that it basically makes stablecoins a forex market, and just a really, really sensitive one, where your dollar is not exactly a dollar between source and destination, there's margin, there's some spread there. It's a highly volatile spread in some cases when you're traveling between different chains that have different finality times. Sometimes it's even, you might say, a hostile market, depending on what's happening on one source or one destination, where MEV searchers are operating and how they're orbiting. And to keep your dollar a dollar, or to keep it close to a dollar, you need to sort of traverse that market with a high degree of sophistication. And that's ultimately what we do. And so you can utilize and program our routing, and you would want to program a different kind of routing solution depending on what your usecase is. If you are building a stablecoin app for businesses or for end-consumers and you want them to simply have a global stablecoin balance regardless of how many stablecoins they're holding across how many different chains and positions, and allow them to then seamlessly use that according to some logic, you can encode that through Eco's routing platform and offer that solution. If you are, on the other hand, a trader that's trying to take a position at large size and you need to kind of split that position to across chains, across eligible venues to limit the market impact of moving your size and moving it into position, you can encode routing for that usecase, and we're just really, really good at handling the routing problem and solution in between. And that might be across DeFi markets on the same chain or it might be across markets on different chains. So, that's where Eco sits.

Excellent. And, yeah, thank you for the thoroughness on that answer. And I'm sure as you guys were solving all of this, all those layers, I'm sure there was a whole slew of technical challenges along the way. I'm just curious is there any particular challenge that you recall as being like, 'Yes, we solved this, nobody else did,' and kind of like how you guys solved that?

Yeah, there's actually some... there's a couple that come to mind. One thing I'll call out is that our routing platform is non-custodial. This is all smart contract development. When you spin up an order, a sort of dedicated smart contract is spawned to kind of like handle your order and its instructions, transmit it to the network, and then once it's transmitted and validated, that sort of original vault contract for your funds self-destructs. Those are fairly well-known paradigms, but they are interesting technical details, and those are covered in our docs. It allows us to serve some customers that we wouldn't be able to serve otherwise. They really care about the non-custodial nature, going end-to-end, and their ability to audit our own code, and that they don't sort of trust custody risk to us as a company in flight. That would complicate their compliance position, it would add another trust assumption to the flow. So that's a really critical detail here. We are on-chain developers, that is our core flex. But the answer I'll give to your question is actually a relatively recent one. And like I said, there's some alpha in this. I believe that our routing technology is market-leading, and it's because we built a router that operates and adapts at runtime. That is our router internally. So, the reason we built it is, remember what I said earlier, stablecoins are like highly sensitive forex markets, and, you know, if you're trading a long-tail pair and the price moves by a few basis points kind of intra-block, it's probably negligible, especially at size. It's not negligible for stablecoins. You're defending against that kind of single basis point movement in real-time, all the time. And that's why I think people underestimate kind of the difficulty of the stablecoin problem across these markets. And so, what we did, or what we have done over the course of the last year, year and a half, to defend against that with a high degree of sophistication, is we built a router that basically adapts as it goes at runtime to ensure that we're getting the best possible execution across on-chain markets. And, very unique and very powerful piece of technology. So, we can encode our router with arbitrary conditions, and it's going to be able to kind of compile those into sort of like those scripts into bytecode that executes at runtime. The reason there's some alpha in that is that we're actually going to open that router up for developer access. So, right now, you only benefit from that router because it's part of our Routes API and how our Routes API makes the decision to move your money, and that's just a swap algorithm that we've written that evaluates the open market depending on where you're trying to go. However, it's arbitrarily programmable. And so, what's interesting is, I think it's our best piece of technology, it has some really clear benefits in terms of spread compression, price control, all-or-nothing execution end-to-end, and we plan to open that up via SDK in the near future so that close partners of Eco can encode their own routing conditions if they're sort of different from our sort of base API. I think that's our best piece of technology currently, it's one of the best pieces of technology we've built. We haven't... we've kind of hinted at that piece of technology, but we haven't said a lot about it publicly, so maybe it's the right conversation to talk a little bit about it.

Beautiful. We love our alpha on this show. And, yeah, we are a developer audience, so I'm sure, I'm sure the folks watching really appreciate that. I guess is there a formal, formal process for people who are interested to get on like the beta list, for example? Or is it kind of like a B2B partner, partner thing only at this point?

It starts as a B2B partner thing only, but we have a studio that we've built, and so, follow Eco on X, because in the coming weeks, that studio will be posted, there'll be some recipes in that studio, and there will be sort of a request for SDK access there. It'll be a beta version, but a few really, really cool things about this. There are some on... some purely on-chain routers that exist in the market today. One interesting thing about ours is that we built it natively cross-chain. So, and that includes EVM to SVM, which I think is real value prop for many developers that want to kind of route across both those ecosystems. And, you know, if the runtime value prop, by the way, is a little bit unclear, it's like, it's as simple as this: whenever you construct and submit a transaction on-chain today, there's at least one block of latency there, even for a pretty high-performance system, especially the case on a chain like Solana where you have really fast block time. A runtime router gives you zero block latency and all-or-nothing execution against your conditions. So, it's going to sort of adapt the transaction construction as the thing is actually executing it goes, within the block, and if it doesn't execute perfectly against your conditions, you're going to get full reversion, which for a lot of people is better than a partial state, clearly. Having that value prop across chains, not only EVM chains but also to SVM, I think is really, really compelling. So, that will be enabled through an SDK and probably an agentic native interface not long thereafter. And so, follow Eco and watch for that announcement to come this quarter.

Beauty. And, yeah, Ryne's X account as well as the Eco X account are linked in the bio below. So, if you want to follow along for that alpha, definitely do. And, I guess on the topic of developer tools, beyond this alpha, what would you say are some other tools and APIs, SDKs, that developers can get their hands on today as they wait on that alpha to come out?

Our core product is called Eco Routes. And that's just the ability to sort of encode fast stablecoin routing across chain between different markets. And, you know, there are different hooks that you can add onto that. So, you know, we have a concept called verified liquidity, so you can set up the Routes config to basically whitelist certain liquidity that you want to consume. We are on the cusp of enabling any-to-any swaps on both ends, so you use stablecoin-stablecoin routing between chains but hook into really efficient swap routing on both ends if you want to sort of get in and out of stablecoins. But it's all accessed through our core Routes API, and then we have a CLI as well. I would actually love developer feedback on this. We're currently going through some internal debate and some partnership discussion on should the Routes API be kind of one API for Eco to rule them all, you know, with configs and every sub-feature sort of enabled through it? Or is it actually less confusing and a better developer experience to create two or three different APIs according to the type of stablecoin flow or the enduse case that you might want? Right now, we default to sort of putting everything simply in the Routes API and sort of designating new features as kind of like a config that you can request access to or you can set up yourself. But if we cram too much in there, it might actually be a little bit confusing for developers and makes sense to kind of split some use cases out. That is an area where we would invite any feedback through official channels on Twitter, through our doc site, wherever it may be, because we're going to be kind of evaluating that with our partners as we go. But that's the main thing. And there's a series of recipes and guides in our existing doc site for how you would leverage the Eco Routes API, different use cases that you would adapt it to, and how you would do so. And the CLI is available as well.

Amazing. And, yeah, folks watching, listening today, the docs and the GitHub organization link are in the description of the video below, so definitely take a gander if your interest has been piqued.

I guess kind of coming back to the topic of stablecoins themselves, I mean, as I've been kind of doing my own research around them and utilizing them, I'm sure maybe it's just like the X algo getting the best of me, but usually somebody speaks about stablecoins, they only kind of see the big players like USDC, USDT, and the key thing being there is it's USD. I guess from the rest of the world's perspective and you being so entrenched in the stablecoin space, are you seeing any other country kind of developing their own stablecoins beyond the US dollar? Or do you think there's still a lot of yellow tape, red tape, I don't know what you want to call it, around that?

Yeah, so it's definitely happening, it's just that the volume demand is still relatively low. But, I'm extremely bullish on non-USD stablecoins. Stablecoins should be the best FX market that has ever existed. So inevitably, to develop a mature FX market, you need all these other currencies that have international demand to have their own stablecoin. And so, that will just inevitably happen. Clearly, the main route to begin with is dollar to euro, and we've seen some of that. A really interesting recent development is I was pretty bullish on Brazilian Real stablecoins, there's like a really active FX corridor between the Real and various foreign currencies, not just the dollar. But Brazil sort of enacted a recent policy to really make it more difficult to move stablecoin Real in and out. Really set up some regulatory and licensing hurdles for a company to be able to do that. So that might actually kind of suppress that pipeline for a period of time, as a recent kind of regulatory change, but that was a very active corridor that was showing a lot of growth with some partner companies that we have. But yes, inevitably, more non-USD stables will spike over the course of the next 12 months and beyond, and I think that on-chain FX use case will really, really start to make a dent in the broader FX market pretty clearly as that happens.

Yeah, I'm of the same thinking. I think it's inevitable. It's just I think a thing around like you said, demand, and the other thing is I think like the governments and regulations and whatnot kind of getting involved in that and how long it'll take to kind of get past those barriers. But we'll see. Things are moving very fast, very fast in all the things this year especially. One of those areas in particular is agentic commerce. I don't know how closely you've been following the progress of that and all the different alphabet soup of protocols and whatnot, like XOL2, MPP, APT2, the list goes on. Just from your perspective, where do you think that whole space is now, and where do you kind of see it going in the near future?

Yeah, I think it's super early. I think it's like demo state. But, I am on the record elsewhere saying that sometime in the next 12 months, it's going to blow up, and it's going to blow up I think in a way that surprises us, just like Claude, OpenClaude did earlier this spring. Like, that was like the personal agentic use case which kind of had some interesting experimentation, but nothing people could really use or trust, and then suddenly, that came out and it was this huge spike in the use case, like a step function spike in the usecase among those who follow AI closely and are willing to set up a tool like that. I think the exact same thing will inevitably happen for agentic commerce. There will be a use case that surprises us, quite possibly invented by an agent or a model, that gets access to stablecoins and starts to transact. In my opinion, up until now, it hasn't been that interesting. What's interesting is what it signals for later, but it's not that interesting in my opinion for an agent to send USDC. That's kind of like the most basic demo. But it will get very interesting very quickly. So there's two ways that I think Eco's prepared for this: one, go back to the router I was talking about before. Should be an incredible tool for an agentic transactor. Think about the ability to script your on-chain routing problem on the fly at lightning speed, at agentic speed. Right, an agent's not going to be well-suited to encode a smart contract with that logic and deploy and destruct that smart contract. What if you could just write a transaction script that gives you that level of control, especially in trading context? So, that tool is one we want to have an agentic interface for, and you can expect as we release that kind of studio demo I talked about that there will be an agentic flow demonstrated there. And then you just got to make sure it's discoverable. So, on the marketing side, you're going to have a really proactive marketing engine to ensure that the models know about your thing, and can find it if it's the best tool for what they want to do. So those are the two ways that we are preparing in that way, and then otherwise, I'm kind of like sit back and wait for that moment, because it is coming, but I don't pretend to know why and where. We should just look forward to it.

Yeah, perfect answer. Yeah, and I'm in the same boat. Very much now things seem very experimental, everything's very developer-oriented, and not a lot of things actually buy. But, yeah, I think that's coming around the corner given, given the state of how fast we can do things these days and the power of all these models, open source and closed. I guess as we're coming to time, you being a founder yourself and kind of living through the ups and downs of crypto, and you mentioning the rubber band kind of finally snapping after all the years of hard work, what piece of advice would you give for aspiring founders and builders today who are just looking to get started?

Two things, if that's okay. The first thing is like know what your why is, know why you are doing it, and be committed to that, because it will potentially, maybe even probably get very hard. And your why is the thing that will allow you to process those moments and kind of, kind of press through them. And so that could be different things. You know, it could be that you want to create a categorical company and you're willing to work on that for 20 years if you can survive that long. It may mean that you think that there's a quick win to be had, and you can build something and sell it in two years. Either one of those is perfectly legitimate, but you need to know why you're doing it. You want to work as a small team, you want to grow into a big company. You just need to know your why, and you probably need to write it down, because it will frame how you go about the challenge. The second thing is, I kind of learned this the hard way, as you go, especially if you grow, there are so many decisions that you'll be confronted with, like a streaming tape of decisions, and they can be distracting. And so you have to remember like your only job, regardless of what your why is, your only job is to build the best product for the people who are dealing with the problem that you set out to solve, and to sell it. And there are lots of other important jobs that come with being a founder, that can sidetrack you. But really your only job, if nothing else, is to do that well for your company to succeed and make it, you know, make it worth your while. And it's just really, sometimes, so dangerously easy to focus on other significant problems that are ultimately less important, if they compromise your focus on building the best product for your problem statement and being able to sell it. You got to bring that home as a company. You can build a cool product, but if no one's willing to pay for it, then you haven't finished your job. And I think that lots of us in crypto have had to find our way through that, in kind of an early immature state of the technology, and so ultimately now, fortunately, the market's matured to the point where people are building real products that people are also paying for. Those are the two things I'd call out.

I love that answer. And, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I hope at least a subset, if not all, of the folks watching today, listening today, are inspired by those words and get them to, to jump off the fence and get building. Ryne, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. I loved our conversation, appreciate the alpha, and really looking forward to all the great things Eco has ahead of it.

Thanks Narb, really appreciate you having us back. Great convo.

My pleasure, my pleasure. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Till then, have a good one folks. Cheers.