The Modern CFO Stack: Stablecoins & Yield with Stepan Simkin from Squads & Altitude

[00:00:00] Stepan: A couple years into building Squads, we started seeing how our customers actually use the product. And we realized that a lot of them use multisig as the defacto business banking solution, right.

[00:00:09] Stepan: And at first we actually tried to figure out how to develop more of these kind of more traditional financial workflows, like on top of multisig itself, right?

[00:00:17] Stepan: But pretty quickly we discovered that these are very different customer personas, right?

[00:00:21] Stepan: Like when you are a multisig users, they're much more engineering aware, right? Like it's usually a CTO or a CEO who kind of understands how to manage, you know, hardware, wallet, who thinks a lot about security versus somebody who is just, you know, looking to do payroll or earn yield on on capital, and just doing kind of regular, you know, payments and paying vendors and contractors, I would say, we pretty quickly discovered that those are, you know, those workflows require separate products because they address different personas from a customer perspective.

[00:00:48] Stepan: And so, that's the kind of the origin story of Altitude. 

[00:00:50] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits podcast, where we help accounting and finance professionals learn how to manage a business using crypto.

[00:00:59] Umar: Stepan Simkin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Squads Protocol, the gold standard for multisig wallets on Solana, securing over $15 billion in value.

[00:01:11] Umar: Stepan also launched Fuse, a finance app built on crypto rails for individuals and Grid a stablecoin API infrastructure for accounts, payments, cards, and yield.

[00:01:24] Umar: In 2025, he launched Altitude, a new global financial account for enterprises.

[00:01:31] Umar: Altitude is a stable coin native financial platform combining ACH and Wire payments, treasury yield, and AR/AP workflows designed to give companies global access without needing a traditional bank account.

[00:01:47] Umar: And in this episode, Stepan will even provide you with a demo of Altitude.

[00:01:53] Umar: Today with Stepan, we'll unpack building Squads and Altitude, why stablecoin adoption has accelerated, the modern CFO stack built on stablecoin rails, privacy and payments, agentic workflows, and much more.

[00:02:10] Umar: And before we dive in, a quick note about The Accountant Quits community platform for web3 accounting and finance professionals.

[00:02:18] Umar: Inside the platform, you can connect with peers working in web3, join focused chat groups. access job opportunities and attend practical workshops on web3 finance.

[00:02:30] Umar: You can join for free by heading to theaccountantquits.com/courses and selecting Free Membership. The link is also in the show notes.

[00:02:39] Umar: Lastly, if you're new to this channel, make sure to like this video and subscribe.

[00:02:43] Umar: It really helps the channel to grow and spread our message to more finance professionals.

[00:02:48] Umar: Now, let's get into my conversation with Stepan. 

[00:02:56] Umar: Stepan welcome and thanks for making the time to be here. 

[00:03:01] Stepan: Thanks much for having me. I'm excited, excited to be here. 

[00:03:05] Umar: To start, can you share your background, how you became interested with blockchains few years ago now, and maybe the origin story of founding Squads? 

[00:03:14] Stepan: Sure. Before getting into crypto, I used to do corporate M&A, structuring large M&A transactions mostly on the corporate side. And then when I was at Clifford Chance, which was a sort of, it's a big English law firm around 2017, Bitcoin was doing its thing and a lot of clients of Clifford Chance were asking, is Bitcoin legal? Can we invest? How do we mine it? And I was in charge of essentially writing a bunch of memos and explaining, what you can actually do with it from a legal perspective. That was my kind of first introduction. And then about sometime in late 2020, I learned about Solana and got really excited about the vision and the idea of solving scalability and performance allowing us as builders to focus on.

[00:03:50] Stepan: Product experiences and actually building a business.

[00:03:53] Stepan: And yeah, around the same time Solana decided to launch a hackathon and I felt the calling and yeah decided to jump in full time. And so from there, basically we were able to put together a small team by the end of the summer of 21, raise a bit of money, and then go and execute on a vision, which at the time was building full stack governance infrastructure for Solana and the first kind of core thing we wanted to focus on the core primitive was multisig. And so we decided to go and perfect that first, and we ended up never building out the rest of the stack and actually built the multisig and got it to a place where it became the standard for the ecosystem.

[00:04:29] Stepan: And then kinda realized that using the same infrastructure that we built on the security posture that we developed for securing digital assets in a more crypto native way can be applied to essentially build a financial services company and helping businesses to run their financial operations entirely on, on this new stack.

[00:04:44] Stepan: And so this is where we're today. 

[00:04:46] Umar: Perfect. I'd like to start our conversation with a general state of stablecoin adoption. So the stablecoin market crossed $300 billion last year, up from $200 billion from the start of 2025. We are now seeing legacy players like Stripe, Visa, PayPal, of course, they've got their stablecoin and also Western Union announced last year they're launching their stablecoin actually on Solana.

[00:05:12] Umar: So stablecoins is of course interesting because it signals real usage rather than just speculation. So from your vantage point, what do you feel has changed maybe technically, regulatory, of course, like in the US or maybe also behaviorally with the end users that make stablecoin feel inevitable today as a core financial infrastructure.

[00:05:39] Stepan: I would say all those three things are important, right? And so there's definitely, I think it all started with there was a sort of technological shift, right? I think when we started the company in 21 I think we just caught the tail end of a time when Circle allowed to do third party payouts, right?

[00:05:56] Stepan: So you could essentially do USDC to somebody else's bank account. I think Circle kinda shut down that capability around like late 21. And being able to do that, being able to do stablecoins 3rd party payouts into different bank accounts is a prerequisite to really building any kind of financial services business on top of stablecoin rails.

[00:06:15] Stepan: And so around 2023. We started seeing other companies try to replicate that and actually build infrastructure around that. And so Bridge was actually one of those companies and they decided to kinda do this early and then started a movement what we call today orchestration.

[00:06:28] Stepan: And then obviously the Stripe acquisition helped making it a lot more prominent. So I would say there's definitely been advancements on the technological side, right? Like we now have a lot of these money movement APIs that allow you to go from fiat to stablecoin and back. So that is definitely a huge driver.

[00:06:41] Stepan: Same kind of bucket. I would put the stablecoin backed card, right? Like the idea that you can launch cards that are linked to stablecoin balances. Again, that is a perquisite for everything we're seeing today. 

[00:06:51] Stepan: From a regulatory perspective, obviously there's with kind of new administration in the US everybody's more comfortable to experiment and try new technologies, whether it's AI or stablecoins.

[00:06:59] Stepan: And I think we're seeing a lot more enterprises, a lot more both on the infrastructure side and the provider side, like PSV are much more eager to, to try things. And then obviously on the customer side there's more customers feel much more free to see what are the solutions out there, right?

[00:07:13] Stepan: From a technology perspective that can unlock better cost structures for them and give them better user experience. I would say that is also a huge factor.

[00:07:19] Stepan: And then I think, we're gradually compounding in terms of crypto adoption more broadly. The world being more comfortable with crypto.

[00:07:27] Stepan: There's UX improvements that happened, right? Like I think, wealth as a service today is much more prominent than it was a couple years ago. And the idea that. I can have all kinds of authentication, whether I can have a wallet that's connected to my WhatsApp account, connected to my email, connected to my phone number, whatever it is.

[00:07:42] Stepan: You can now really have a lot more flexibility and I think that is also a huge component. So companies like, obviously Privy, Turnkey, Dynamic there's many in the space. I think they also definitely helped in moving this forward. And then I would say the kind of the one more thing is like general like robustness of blockchains, right?

[00:07:58] Stepan: Like, I think blockchains are performing much better. We do have abundance of block space. I'd say from a security perspective, also, if you look at previous cycles you had, majority of hacks would actually be smart contract hacks, right? Now majority of attacks are actually social engineering.

[00:08:11] Stepan: There are attacks on the kind of upper layers on the stack because smart contracts are becoming more robust and resilient. And so I would say all those factors combined got us to where we're today. 

[00:08:22] Umar: Perfect. Now for the listener, I forgot to mention this earlier, but today's a special episode because at towards the end of the episode, Stephan will actually be showing us a demo of Altitude.

[00:08:34] Umar: And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, it's probably best to switch to either Spotify or YouTube.

[00:08:40] Umar: Now moving to Squads and Altitude. So you first started with Squads and it's a multisig to manage assets on Solana. Similar to SAFE for EVM chains. Squads is basically the equivalent household name on Solana.

[00:08:56] Umar: If people are unfamiliar with the term multisig, I just want to quickly explain what that means. An externally owned account or an EOA wallet, like let's say MetaMask, which you might be using personally, isn't really suited for organizations, right? That's because it relies on a single private key to execute transactions. So if you were to lose or if that key got compromised, basically your funds are gone.

[00:09:21] Umar: Now a multisig shortfall multisignature wallet, it solves that problem by requiring multiple private keys to authorize a transaction. Think of it, it's similar to a company's bank account where you need multiple bank signatories before a transfer is approved right?

[00:09:38] Umar: Now, I was seeing that on your website, Squads has over 15 billion in TVL and the focus of our conversation today is more on Altitude the new product that Squads has built. So Altitude is a global financial account for businesses. It's built on stablecoin rails on Solana, and it provides payments, yields, cards and I believe also AR/AP (coming soon), which Stepan will show us a little bit later. So it is a modern CFO stack and built with stablecoins at its core. How did this experience building Squads lead to Altitude? 

[00:10:21] Stepan: Great question. Originally multisig was, and still has a very, both crypto native and institutional facing product.

[00:10:27] Stepan: Like you have to know what you're doing right. And when we started with also a very developer facing product and still is like majority of Solana programs. A lot of Solana validators are upgraded through our multisig infrastructure. And obviously treasury workflows were always paramount. Like when you launch a token, you would put a lot of the supply into the multisig.

[00:10:43] Stepan: You would then do a lot of financial operations with your own token, or you would raise some capital and stablecoins that would also go into multisig. And so we always facilitated a lot of those capabilities on the multisig side. And I would say a couple years into building Squads we started seeing how our customers actually use the product.

[00:10:58] Stepan: And we realized that a lot of them use multisig as the defacto business banking solution right.

[00:11:03] Stepan: And at first we actually tried to figure out how to develop more of these kind of more traditional financial workflows in like on top of multisig itself, right? Like, and try to integrate them into the single product.

[00:11:14] Stepan: But we pretty quickly, we discovered that these are very different customer personas, right? Like when you are a multisig user is much more they're much more engineering aware, right? Like it's usually a CTO or a CEO who understands how to manage hardware, wallet, who thinks a lot about security.

[00:11:29] Stepan: Who like for whom all the workflows that we developed, whether it's program management, validator management, or like complex DeFi directions are valuable and very much understandable versus somebody who is just looking to do payroll or earn yield on capital while in between payroll cycles.

[00:11:44] Stepan: And I would say and just doing regular payments and paying vendors and contractors. I would say we pretty briefly discovered that those are workflows require separate products because they address different personas from a customer perspective.

[00:11:54] Stepan: And that's uh, kind of the origin story of Altitude, I would say. We also saw, just like as we had more capabilities unlocked on the stablecoin side, we realized that when you combine the scalability and performance of Solana, the security and programmability of Squads protocol, and you essentially add all the infrastructure providers that we work with today, be it from vault to service, from orchestration.

[00:12:15] Stepan: You can really kinda rethink what does the stack for building a financial services company look like in today's world? And that was really exciting. And so it was a very exciting opportunity for us. And we also really like the idea of owning the stack, right? That's what the Squads background allows us to do.

[00:12:29] Stepan: So we own everything from protocol to API to the product layer, right? And I think from that perspective, that gives us a lot of flexibility and also gives us a lot more certainty when we're onboarding customers into essentially a self custodial system. Making sure that their, their assets are safe as opposed to us relying on third party providers for some of the vertical workflow.

[00:12:49] Umar: Now the other topic I want to touch on Stepan is on providing operators with global access. So you have these leading FinTech tools like Mercury, Brex, or Ramp, these are US first companies or solutions, meaning the primary serve US incorporated companies, right? A non-US founder, they can use those solutions.

[00:13:13] Umar: They can get onboarded, but only if they incorporate in the US. Altitude is available right now in 150 plus countries, including the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, UAE, India. Altitude is not a bank, right? So it doesn't custody funds, but it leverages on Squad's, permissionless, multisig infrastructure, and then you build the financial operations layer on top.

[00:13:38] Umar: My question is, how does that architecture being self custodial and protocol based rather than bank based change access for founders and operators outside the US? 

[00:13:51] Stepan: Yes, I would say that is if you think about the spectrum of different providers who are offering financial services to businesses, right?

[00:13:56] Stepan: You can start from there's banks that are oldest and the slowest. Then you've got the FinTech kind of 1.0 that's Stripe and Ramp and Brex count towards that bucket. Then you have newer fintechs that are much more willing to play ball with stablecoins, like Meow is a good example from New York.

[00:14:11] Stepan: And then you've got sort of us, right? Where the way we're different to all the other guys is that all of them are fiat first and then stablecoin compatible, right? We are stablecoin first and fiat compatible. So what that means is as you mentioned, the assets are not custodied in a bank, right?

[00:14:25] Stepan: They're actually held in a self wallet that you create when you onboard to the platform. So that allows us to technically be global from day one, right? Like we can be available in a lot of places at the same time. This doesn't mean that we're able to fully service those markets, right? Because there's a lot of different fiat connectivity issues that we need to solve.

[00:14:42] Stepan: If you want to do local payouts in a specific country, we still, there's still infrastructure work that's required. But that really flips the model for us, right? Like where, when we think about expanding to other markets, we're not thinking about, oh, which banking partner should we get?

[00:14:54] Stepan: Should we get licensed in this jurisdiction? Kind of flips, right? Like we can see, okay, we see a lot of demand from this geography. Let's go there. Let's start onboarding customers and then over time kinda develop deeper fiat connectivity, right? And so I think that really allows us to go global much quicker that the kind of downside of that approach, which is also in many ways an opportunity that we're solving, right?

[00:15:14] Stepan: How can you build trust in this kind of system? Because in the US when you're working to, to all these providers, like it's just FDIC, right? And so you trust that the government, will bail out case something goes wrong. That said though, there were cases right where like even in a kind of, in, in FinTech layers, right?

[00:15:28] Stepan: Can get lost in reconciliation hell, which happened with those signups, right? And still people I think can't account for, I think 90 million in lost funds. So the traditional FinTech system is not perfect either. But I would say from a trust perspective, when you think about self custody, we're very committed to actually cracking that problem.

[00:15:45] Stepan: You will trust your self custodial, formally verified account onchain more than actually trusting bank accounts. That is even FDIC insured, just because again, the only reason you need FDIC is because you don't trust the banks, because the money isn't there, right? Because of fractional reserve and like when you actually, deposit your capital, it gets reused for a lot of different things and it's not actually there.

[00:16:05] Stepan: Which is very different when you're obviously doing it with wallets, because the money's actually always there. You can see it onchain. 

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[00:17:51] Umar: So what are you seeing right now? Do these companies actually still need a bank account? And we'll go through Altitude later as well. We'll show the platform, but in terms of onboarding people like companies are able to make payments from stablecoins to like stablecoins to fiat right? And you would be taking care of the off ramping.

[00:18:12] Stepan: Correct. So when you onboard to Altitude, you create accounts, you are able to add different team members and you can set up different access controls and permissions. And then from there all your balances are held in stablecoins, right? So for dollars we use USDC, for Euros, we use EURC. In the app. This just looks like Dollars and Euros.

[00:18:28] Stepan: And then you're able to obviously transact on stablecoins if you want to pay a vendor, using USDC. Or you can send an ACH payment, you can send a domestic wire payment, a SEPA payment in Euros. Or soon we're launching SWIFT in case in case you do want to go the SWIFT route and wait for three or four days and pay sort of a higher fee.

[00:18:45] Stepan: Yeah and for you from a user experience perspective, like it's seamless for you just see your dollar in Altitude account being off-ramped to somebody else's bank account, for example, by ACH. And obviously we are facilitating all the, all the behind the scenes work to make it feel like it's just dollars moving either into a stablecoin wallet or into somebody else's bank account or your own.

[00:19:05] Umar: Yeah. I really like the fact that all these SEPA, ACH transfers now are built from a self custodial solution. Like these neo banks the Mercury of the world or now Meow, you mentioned, Dakota. Would they even need to use those solutions or just leverage like a multisig solution, like Squads and then use like Altitude.

[00:19:30] Stepan: So it would say, I think the quality is very much in our bucket, right? Like where they are stablecoin first and they're connected to fiat, right? I would say for everybody else, what we're seeing, like there's, now there's Slash there's other providers. Even I think, Brex announced last year that they're gonna do stablecoin top ops, right?

[00:19:44] Stepan: I think that's kinda where that's the extent for the most part, that's how they're touching stablecoins. They're saying if you want to fund your account on stablecoin, or if you wanna do a payout in stablecoin, we'll facilitate that. I think which makes sense from their perspective, but like the way we see the opportunity right, is when essentially the account that holds the user assets is disconnected from the bank, and that actually becomes a programmable account onchain. You're able to do things that you just aren't able to program on top of a bank account. Right?

[00:20:11] Stepan: And so when we're thinking about agentic workflows, when we're thinking about deeper sort of programmability and automations that you would want to configure around your bank account or around your account with where you store your corporate treasury, obviously, the unlock is massive, right?

[00:20:23] Stepan: And so I would say. I would love to see more of these players. Actually move onchain, right? And say, actually, you know what, we we don't need FDIC insured accounts as a backend, right to deliver our services. But so far that hasn't been the trend, right? And that is also the trend on their side of that anchors them to the US right?

[00:20:38] Stepan: Because it's very hard for you to say we're available globally and open bank accounts in the US right? For companies all over the world, be it, India, HongKong, Singapore, whatever, I would say the wallet model, right? The onchain model is instantly more scalable because you can onboard whole world.

[00:20:53] Stepan: So as long as you are able to guarantee from a sort of trust and security perspective that, the money is always gonna be there, you're just obviously gonna have a lot more connectivity to just to more markets. 

[00:21:05] Umar: Perfect. I wanna move on to speak a bit about yield. So we've talked about adoption.

[00:21:11] Umar: Now the operator's reality is that, and I speak to a lot of these finance professionals that they are sitting on large, stablecoin treasuries, USDC, USDT. A lot of times they don't deploying them. It's not because they don't want additional yield on these stablecoins, but, once you move beyond simple of custody, you introduce smart contract risk, counterparty risk, liquidity risk.

[00:21:36] Umar: A lot of these web3 teams, they don't have a formal risk framework built internally to evaluate those trade-offs. Now, in Altitude, users can earn yield on stablecoin balances backed one-to-one by short term US treasuries. This is being managed by BlackRock. This is what I want to unpack for this episode.

[00:21:54] Umar: How do you use stablecoin rails and offer yield without forcing the these teams to deal with all those onchain complexities? And maybe what are you abstracting away from the user experience? 

[00:22:07] Stepan: That's a great question. The current offering with Altitude rewards is really. It's a simple model where when you onboard the Altitude, you have to KYB, right?

[00:22:14] Stepan: And then, Bridge actually facilitates this functionality for us. What happens is you send USDC to Bridge, there's a stablecoin that gets minted just to really track, how much you have actually deposited. They off ramp your USDC, then go and buy a bunch of treasuries and custody them at BlackRock.

[00:22:30] Stepan: And the benefit of this approach, if you buy USDC on Uniswap or on Jupiter, or even on Coinbase. You essentially bought USDC on secondary market and you don't have any legal relationship to Circle right. There, there is no legal recourse. You have to them as the issuer because somebody else minted that USDC before you.

[00:22:45] Stepan: And then put it on those markets, which is very different in our case. If you go and deposit into Altitude rewards, you are directly interfacing with Bridge and Stripe, right? And they are your counterparty. They're minting that essentially stablecoin for you. And so that gives you actually a lot more guarantees than simply holding USDC in a wallet, right?

[00:23:01] Stepan: And so from a CFO perspective, thinking about risk perspective like that is definitely a great, value add. I would say the way we think about the earn kind of more broadly, is that you essentially have the kind of, the default treasury rates, treasury rewards, structure that will always exist and I think it's becoming much more of the norm, right?

[00:23:18] Stepan: To facilitate that happening onchain. But, US treasury rate is gonna go up and down. There's always gonna be volatility. And at certain point we do expect that corporate treasuries will start looking for other opportunities, right? Like how to earn yield on our capital in a sustainable way.

[00:23:32] Stepan: And then you're kinda looking at either DeFi or RWAs, right? And again, we're seeing a great renaissance right now where those also intermixed, right? Like on Solana, Kamino is working a lot with Figure they're working with ONRE right, which is like ONRE is like a reinsurance protocol. That is all the yield is basically off chain.

[00:23:48] Stepan: Same goes for Figure, right? Which is the real estate yield. And so I would say we are gonna be exploring alternative yield sources as well, right on top of Altitude rewards where yes, there's gonna be like, it's definitely gonna be position with a medium or a higher risk option than just purely going into rewards.

[00:24:03] Stepan: But I would say we're seeing more operators become comfortable with that type of allocation, right. I guess also mentioning here we do allow on Altitude for you to allocate to Bitcoin, right? And like we're seeing some demand from corporate treasury saying, actually, you know what, like 1% of our corporate treasury, we just want to keep in Bitcoin, right?

[00:24:20] Stepan: And that is their way of diversifying and thinking about risk. So that is also happening less so with other tokens but with Bitcoin specifically, I would say it's earned its place of a potential kind of hedge and diversification assets, even for corporate treasuries.

[00:24:33] Stepan: Less so for starters with, for like larger players, we're seeing that demand for sure. 

[00:24:38] Umar: Yeah. I think it would be a great user experience for the user to have different yield options, but to also kinda see like a credit score or risk score on different DeFi platforms or different products like you can deploy into Morpho, and internally, like when we speak to these finance professionals, this is a bit where they struggle with, like to assess like the underlying of that specific vault, for example, and how to go about in terms of the risk that the organization wants to undertake.

[00:25:09] Umar: Now maybe one of the follow up questions I have is from a CFO's perspective, what do you think or what due diligence should be done before they deploy their treasury funds through a platform like Altitude. You said that right now you are it's only through BlackRock and I believe that's at the discretion of Bridge, like why it's only BlackRock as well.

[00:25:33] Stepan: That's just how the, that's how Bridge and Stripe work, right? That's how their stablecoin infrastructure is designed. I would say when you're thinking about value chain overall, like going into a platform like this, first thing you have to look at is what stablecoin is used behind the scenes, right?

[00:25:46] Stepan: That's your issuer risk. I would say we are very comfortable with Circle and like we hold our corporate balances in USDC and our customers are happy as well. There's also like great preference for USDT among specific customers and like that's for you to evaluate whether which issuer to rely on.

[00:26:00] Stepan: But that's the first thing you have to look at. I think in any event, you're gonna be looking at sort of the smart contract risk. Either if you're touching DeFi for sure, but even if not, like you're if it's a wallet infrastructure, if it's a programmable wallet, if it's a smart account, you have to understand like, is this protocol immutable?

[00:26:14] Stepan: Is this formally verified? How many, what does it under undergo? Right? So I think all those things, same thing apply when you're evaluating what to do and, onchain with your personal wallet. Like those are the same evaluations that you should take a look at there. And then what I mentioned in the early part of the conversation.

[00:26:28] Stepan: Like the risk is moving up the stack, right? From smart contracts to other layers. And so we are seeing a lot more, crypto companies, DeFi protocols starting to become SOC2 certified. And that is also it's not a solution to all problems, but it's a good start, right?

[00:26:43] Stepan: If you're able to, plus the certification I think looking for all those signals makes sense and then being able to that's how you underwrite risk in this case. But I guess the benefit here is once you do get comfortable with a model there's great certainty, right, in terms of how it all works.

[00:26:58] Stepan: And there's a lot less surprises, as opposed to when you're using like a more opaque system, right? Where like in a bank you actually don't know where your money is and trying to project, right? What's gonna happen to a specific bank and how does their balance sheet look like, is actually harder than evaluating from a technical perspective.

[00:27:13] Stepan: Is this protocol secure, right? Like, how does this custody architecture actually work?

[00:27:18] Umar: Now I have a question on using autonomous agents, but I think I'll ask you this question if we have time after the demo, because I think it would make more sense for the listener after the demo. So I wanna move on to a topic on privacy. So the premise of public blockchains like Ethereum, Solana and many others are obviously their transactions are public.

[00:27:40] Umar: It is viewable by anyone on the block explorer. But if stablecoins are to become real financial infrastructure, privacy cannot be optional, right? So we are seeing alternative approaches like the Canton Network. They take a permission privacy first architecture for mostly for institutional finance payers.

[00:28:01] Umar: There's an article that you wrote on X, and I'm gonna share this article in the show notes. You talk about selective disclosure, the ability to prove what needs to be proven without revealing everything else. You mentioned that this technology exists, but it's not battle tested yet. Can you unpack that and maybe share what selective disclosure would look like in practice for a finance team?

[00:28:27] Stepan: Yeah, so I would say. When you think about privacy, like privacy is just too broad of a concept, right? Like you have to kinda separate that into you want confidentiality or you want anonymity, right? Like confidentiality implies that you understand the party that are transacting, but you are not, you don't know the amounts.

[00:28:42] Stepan: And anonymity means you dunno who's transacting and therefore you, you don't, even though, you've gotta match the amounts as well. So I would say where we're kind of, I think lending on as an industry is really that confidentiality is the way to go, at least for the foreseeable future.

[00:28:55] Stepan: The way I think about the space, right, is like you have different kinds of solutions, right? Like you've got the more onchain native ones where it's some kind of like a program that runs onchain. There's a sort of ZK proofs for coming in and out of the program. There's completely off chain systems, right?

[00:29:10] Stepan: Where there's MPC networks that are using, they're using ZK proofs as well. I'm not a privacy engineer or security researcher in that sense. But I would say what we have discovered was like. We spent a lot of time battle testing Squads the protocol, right? Making it formally verified, auditing it many times, making most versions of it immutable over time as well.

[00:29:28] Stepan: And when we think about privacy, majority of the solutions today basically require us to say, if you want to shield a certain balance and allow your customer transact confidentially, you have to take the assets of that customer out of Squads protocol and move it into this new program, right? That has a giant code base.

[00:29:47] Stepan: That is impossible to formally verify that has a lot of brand new cryptography and you have to trust that system if you want confidentiality, right? And so today that trade off is not great for us because the reason our customers trust the infrastructure is because of the security posture we've built up.

[00:30:03] Stepan: And asking to sacrifice that for the sake of privacy and confidentiality is not great trade-offs. Like you really need to solve for both. And I do think that it's probably paramount. Like we're actually, I can't fully talk about the publicly yet. We do have our own solution for this and I would say there's different kind of grades of how far you can go with privacy or confidentiality.

[00:30:22] Stepan: We're gonna kinda land somewhere in the good middle on the spectrum, basically allowing our customers to have confidential balances, right? Or have specific confidential sub accounts. And I'll talk more about later how we're achieving that. But we do think that this is incredibly important for the space.

[00:30:36] Stepan: I do think solving it as I wouldn't build a separate blockchain for this, right. I think figuring out a way to solve it on the general purpose chain is the way to go. And also over time we'll see a lot more of these solutions get more battle tested, right? And earn trust of the security community or their customers.

[00:30:52] Stepan: And so I'm sure we'll have more options. I just think. It's not like the point I made in article is these are all, there's a lot of great tech and a lot of it's promising, but we have to scrutinize the security here more. 'cause privacy is not just about functionality, right? It's not just about can you make the, can you conceal this balance, right?

[00:31:09] Stepan: Or this transaction, it's actually about can you conceal it? But also in a way that doesn't require me to trust a brand new smart contract where I can lose a lot of my funds. 

[00:31:18] Umar: So you saying that there is a privacy solution already existing on Solana today right where transactions could be sent, which would not be publicly viewable.

[00:31:29] Stepan: There's a lot of solutions. So you've got Light protocol that are doing the more onchain native way. So they're building different onchain programs with ZK proofs that allow users to conceal balances. You've got RKM which is doing it more from a they built their own network and they're using MPC to do that.

[00:31:44] Stepan: You've got like younger teams that are doing it from different perspectives like trade. They're actually doing it to that. A smart way where there's just a wallet network and they're just obfuscating your amounts because you basically spin up like a fresh wallet every time you're transacting, right?

[00:31:58] Stepan: So there's different approaches, right? It's like you, you just have to choose the one that, you're most comfortable with as a team and then go and figure out how to internalize it in the product. Solana Foundation themselves also built a confidential plugin standard, right? That's baked into Token 2022, right?

[00:32:13] Stepan: And so there's different solutions. It's just the question of which one can you underwrite from a risk perspective to the point that we talked about before.

[00:32:19] Umar: Perfect. Stephan, I'm looking at the time, I know we don't have that much time left and I really want to show the listeners what Altitude should looks like.

[00:32:28] Umar: So, because most of our audience and listeners already working at web3 companies, a lot of them are using multisigs like Squads. They might just not have heard of Altitude yet. So, I mentioned this earlier, but if you're open to it, can you now maybe share your screen and walk us through the platform from a finance operator's perspective?

[00:32:50] Stepan: Absolutely. Let me just share my screen. Alright, so here's my demo account. So we're gonna run through all the, all the core functionality quickly here. We have the approvals page where you get the approval, reject, transactions that get queued up, and then if the threshold for approvals has been met, you get to execute the transaction and the payment goes out.

[00:33:08] Stepan: This is the Treasury page where you have Dollar accounts and Euro accounts. You can do traditional bank transfers through ACH, SEPA and Wire or do stablecoin transfers onchain. You can also transfer funds between accounts. So for example, you can do, transfer between your dollar account or euro account.

[00:33:25] Stepan: Here's a $100. You have automated onchain FX. So this is actually a swap between USDC and EURC done through through Jupiter.

[00:33:35] Stepan: So here you can see your Euro account denominated in Euros. This is the inflows and outflows page, which is more accounting friendly, allows you to do exports and PDFs or CSV.

[00:33:45] Stepan: CSV obviously great for then syncing, things both with QuickBooks, particularly useful for, for, for the accountant.

[00:33:52] Stepan: This is the earn page where you can earn reward on your dollars. It's powered by infrastructure by from Bridge and Stripe. And it's backed by short-term US Treasury managed by BlackRock.

[00:34:03] Stepan: We have the holdings page where you can buy and hold Solana or, or Bitcoin.

[00:34:07] Stepan: You have, the Bill Pay page, which actually it's a new feature that we just launched last week. It allows you to upload, an invoice that you receive. And there's also, you can do it manually, by just dragging and dropping it here, or you have this sort of the email that you can send invoices to and then they get automatically uploaded into your Altitude Bill Pay page.

[00:34:26] Stepan: Then it gets scanned automatically and kind it matches. If you have a recipient, already saved that matches the, the one on the invoice, then it matches automatically and allows you to then just initiate the transaction and, and it's, once it's approved, and executed, it just the payment goes out.

[00:34:42] Stepan: We have the setting page here where you can configure the threshold, add additional 2FA security and kinda manage your own bank accounts that you can add once you actually complete the KYB.

[00:34:52] Stepan: You have the members page here, where you can add different members and set different permissions and parameters in terms of who and how can interact with the account.

[00:34:59] Stepan: You have the recipients page, where you can see all the recipients and add sort of more, more contacts. Here you can also contact support. And then we have the, the help center. So this is the Altitude demo. 

[00:35:10] Stepan: And then I think that's it for now, right? I think we kinda went through, through all the major functionality we're launching corporate cards very soon. And, that is probably coming later, next month.

[00:35:22] Stepan: And then there's a lot more kind of like Bill Pay is just the, the beginning right of, of our journey into kind of building out the CFO Suite around Altitude. So invoicing is coming, kind of deeper accounting workflows are coming as well.

[00:35:33] Stepan: And so yeah, the platform is evolving and we're developing a lot of features at the same time. And there's also, yeah, kind of a lot of exciting things I can't really talk about publicly yet.

[00:35:42] Umar: A question I have. So are the Squads features available here, like the multisig features available in, or you still have to use Squads separately for them?

[00:35:51] Stepan: So the separation is basically if you're dealing with stablecoins, right? And you're running essentially a stablecoin treasury, you go to Altitude, right? And here you can configure again, it's similar setup where you can configure the threshold, you can add different signers. You can also add passkeys for 2FA, for signer. So all those capabilities are here, but obviously if you want to do advanced onchain workflows like managing programs, validators, tokens, and interacting with DeFi, all of that is for Squads, right? So if this is for the CFO, right Squads is for the CTO that's probably the way to think about.

[00:36:23] Umar: So if you have fund sitting in a multisig on Squads, you can just come here and do outflows and receive the funds on your Squads multisig here. 

[00:36:33] Stepan: So workflow that we see, right? Like you're a team that has a hundred million of stablecoins, right sitting in Squads. You would transfer 20 or 15 or 10 into Altitude account and then run your financial operations through Altitude while multisig you use essentially as a deeper treasury solution as a cold storage solution.

[00:36:49] Stepan: Okay? 

[00:36:50] Umar: Okay, I understand. Perfect that's a great demo. Is that did you want to show us anything else or maybe that's it. 

[00:36:58] Stepan: No, I think from a demo perspective we're in a good place. 

[00:37:01] Umar: Perfect. And how would is there any onboarding requirements to Altitude, how does that look like?

[00:37:07] Stepan: Yeah, so onboarding perspective, you can create an account without passing KYB, right?

[00:37:12] Stepan: So if you want to access purely launching features, so you can create a wallet, you can accept stablecoins, you can send stablecoins, you can configure signers and all those parameters. But obviously if you want to access, fiat payments, ACH, SEPA, Wire you're gonna have to KYB and obviously all that same process will unlock for you.

[00:37:26] Stepan: All the capabilities around corporate cards and all the future features we're launching around payment and many workflows. 

[00:37:32] Umar: Perfect. You just mentioned workflows that was a question that I had. Maybe you can give us a teaser of what's upcoming and yeah how can these finance team like create some automation workflows using Altitude in the near future?

[00:37:47] Stepan: Yeah, so right now we're really setting up this foundation, right? Because it's really the very core is you create an account where you can hold your balance. You can earn yield on that balance. You can spend it, right? So that's why corporate cards are important. And then you're obviously able to transact and make payments.

[00:38:01] Stepan: So that is really the core. On top of that, you have the CFO suite, right? So that's essentially workflow that we're building into the app on top of these, on top of the core. So that includes bill paying, that includes invoicing, that includes accounting. And then on top of that the next phase will be creating deeper automations, right?

[00:38:19] Stepan: And allowing you to essentially do a lot less, right? From a from an operator perspective. So what that means for example, because we're using onchain policies, right? We can say that, these certain, like the three recipients here are whitelist, and so if they are sending you an invoice to your email inbox and the name matches the same details are like the same address that you usually send them to matches in the invoice, you can have an agent automatically initiate the transaction for you to approve and then you will execute or you can have an agent actually do the payment end to end.

[00:38:50] Stepan: If you're comfortable, I would say that will get to at later stages. But when you think about, why build a FinTech on top of stablecoins and blockchains, that is one of the very good reasons, right? Because when you're dealing with a traditional bank account, and you are a FinTech building this experience on top there's always gonna be like a human element in the loop, right?

[00:39:09] Stepan: For you to do this kind of final approval. In this case, you can have an agent control a key. You can give them very clear permission and guardrails. And within those guardrails, you can give them full autonomy, right? Like that is the unlock. For example, you can give agent full control in terms of doing auto sweeps, right?

[00:39:24] Stepan: So if you ever have more than X in your treasury account. Have an agent move it into rewards every time, right? Or at the end of each month. And so for that, you can give agents full autonomy because the worst case agent can do is move funds from your awards account back to your cash account, right?

[00:39:40] Stepan: Like even if it's hallucinates or something goes wrong, because onchain, right? A thousand nodes that runs Solana guarantee on the execution layer that the agent can only do those things, right? And to change those policies, you have to meet consensus of the whole account, right? And so from that perspective, that's a big unlock.

[00:39:57] Stepan: And so that is definitely coming. I would say we're very committed to first build out the foundations though. 'cause we have a lot of operators that want to be able to spend and spin out virtual cards. They will have a lot of operators that are still looking for invoicing. And so we do want to create this foundation first.

[00:40:11] Stepan: But we do think, again, like it is coming back to the idea of owning the stack, right? Like from a product perspective, we also want to own as much of the stack as possible, right? And all these kind of workflows we want deeply and virtually integrated into the single experience. And then on top of that, you can layer on agentic automations and giving allowing us as an operator to just do a lot less.

[00:40:28] Umar: One question I have on Altitude is who would be the users of Altitude? Meaning are these only users who use USDC, other stablecoins on Solana? Like are you targeting like EVM teams, other blockchain teams? 

[00:40:44] Stepan: Yeah. So I would say we are launching multichain deposits relatively soon, right?

[00:40:48] Stepan: And so from a user perspective, you will not really know that you're on Solana, right? You'll be able to send to any chain, accept from any chain. And I think the way to think about it is like some teams are using, either you could use a centralized backend, right? Like I know Turnkeys using AWS natural we are using Solana as our backup, right?

[00:41:03] Stepan: And so from that perspective it'll be very agnostic, right? And so today we're seeing a lot of demand from teams. That are actually, they don't really care about the chain as much as they care about, like they already have a stablecoin balance and they want proper financial workflows applying to that balance.

[00:41:17] Stepan: 'cause today, the way it works, right? Like they probably have multisig and a Mercury account, right? And so for fiat stuff and for like billing or bill pay, they have to go to Mercury and then some payments they make from Stablecoin. But Altitude, we're able to compress that into a single experience.

[00:41:30] Stepan: Right? So you have your, and also by the way a lot of these teams today, when you have a multisig on Squads, a multisig on Safe, an account with Mercury, an account with Brex, you end up doing your accountant and ends up doing manual reconciliation at the end of each month or quarter, right? Because you have to pull the data from all the four places, put it in a spreadsheet, then like do some editing, maybe use Integral as like an intermediate solution, and then you upload it to QuickBooks and then you can actually do your reporting.

[00:41:52] Stepan: With Altitude, like if you are, there's a lot of benefit in just running everything there. 'cause your fiat transactions, your crypto transactions are all in the same place, same exports, same things. So there's a lot of benefits to that for sure. 

[00:42:03] Umar: So will you be building your own accounting solution or you would just integrate with those existing subledgers you just mentioned? Integral. Like Integral, TRES, Cryptio, etc 

[00:42:14] Stepan: Yes, I would say the way we think about it, 'cause we spend a lot of time with CFOs, right? And accountants, and we get two pieces of feedback, right? Like some accountants value greatly the fact that you have these kinda like, intermediate solutions where you can upload all the crypto transactions, you can edit them like Integral.

[00:42:29] Stepan: We're pretty close with. Awaken is also a great one. So you can upload your transaction from there. You, that allows you to do this kinda like intermediary editing, and then you actually move it into your QuickBooks or whatever you're using. Other accountants say to us that we don't want more tools, like we want just everything.

[00:42:44] Stepan: We want to just have a clean export straight into QuickBooks right? And so I guess the answer is if you do require to use something before you actually upload it to QuickBooks we'll be fully compatible with whatever the tool of choice you have. But we'll also facilitate clean exports directly into your and main system if this is the preference as well.

[00:43:02] Stepan: So we'll be agnostic from that perspective, but we're not building our own like accounting software from that perspective, like definitely. And tax reporting this is not part of the stack, at least right now. 

[00:43:11] Umar: Very exciting. Congrats to the team at Squads. Like this is fantastic. You mentioned the fact that people won't have to care what blockchain they're on and they can just use Altitude, I think this is what all finance teams have been like wishing for. I'm looking at the time Stepan, the title of the episode today was using stablecoins in the CFO stack. As closing thoughts, how would you summarize this episode for the listeners?

[00:43:36] Umar: Or if, has there been anything that we didn't mention that you'd like to share with the listeners? 

[00:43:42] Stepan: I would say stablecoins used to be a pretty niche technology, right? That was used by crypto natives. Today, like with Altitude is really our quest to prove that they're just a superior technology to do financial operations.

[00:43:54] Stepan: No matter if you're in crypto, outside of crypto. And so I just encourage everybody to take a closer look towards the industry. I do think today there is from an Altitude perspective, we're focusing a lot on just servicing existing demand. Like if you already have stablecoin balances, you come to us.

[00:44:09] Stepan: But I think as we progress, right, like this will be abstracted the way more and more. And I do think that. It's just superior infrastructure to run your company. We actually never had a bank account at Squads. We started the company in 21 and we've been running it on stables from the very early days.

[00:44:23] Stepan: And today obviously it feels great because we have a lot more tools and we're obviously dog fooding, everything we're building right? And using it ourselves. So I encourage, more and more accountants listening to this gonna be more open minded and I'm happy to give unbiased stakes about the industry and like what works and what doesn't.

[00:44:37] Stepan: And I'm happy to be transparent about the risks, but I would say there's a lot of great benefits and it's worth looking into. 

[00:44:42] Umar: Thank you, Stepan. There's a last question, which I usually like to ask to my guests before they leave is, do you have a favorite quote or maybe a maxim that you live by? 

[00:44:54] Stepan: Yeah. I quite like the expression anything worth doing is worth overdoing and so it's kinda like the idea that. If it's good for you, there's no limit. It doesn't scale to everything, but I guess it creates this interesting filter that like in your life, the things that you accept into your life, really, if you take them to maximum extent, they should still be not good for you.

[00:45:14] Stepan: It's just been an interesting it's been with me for a couple years now and it's an interesting exercise as you go through life. 

[00:45:21] Umar: Thanks for sharing. If people want to learn more about Altitude I'll be sharing, of course, the link to, of the website in the show notes. Where should they go? Who should they reach out to, or, if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way?

[00:45:37] Stepan: So for all to do, just go to Altitude.xyz. We're actually have the domain now and then if you want to learn more or speak to somebody, just DM me on Twitter. It's @SimkinStepan and I'll tell you all about it. 

[00:45:48] Umar: Perfect. Thanks a lot for coming in today, Stepan, and we'll be in touch. 

[00:45:53] Stepan: Thanks for having us. It's been great.