Webinars

Once a niche crypto trading tool, stablecoins are increasingly being used to facilitate global payments and money movement. As mainstream adoption increases, compliance programs are being rebuilt to fit the needs of this new rail. The frameworks are familiar from traditional finance, but stablecoins have different mechanics. Blockchain transactions settle in near real-time, are often irreversible, and are public and traceable. 

This combination raises novel operational questions. How do you design Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) procedures to fit onchain programs? What does transaction monitoring look like when you’re dealing in stablecoins? How do stablecoin rails make it easier to monitor and trace sources of funds? 

In this webinar, Castellum.AI CEO and Co-founder Peter Piatresky sits down with some of the compliance and policy leaders that are answering these questions. Tyler Nielsen, Head of OFAC and Sanctions Compliance at Rain, Tom Armstrong, Head of Compliance Advisory at TRM Labs, and Lesley Chavkin, Head of Global Public Policy at Ribbit Capital, explain what an effective compliance program looks like when the assets are onchain. 

Watch on-demand to learn more about: 

• How asset freezes and seizures work on the blockchain, and the different playbooks stablecoin issuers follow 
• Why compliance screening needs to happen not only before transactions are initiated, but also after in continuous monitoring programs 
• What the newly-passed GENIUS Act in the US means for stablecoin issuers and payment processors  
• How autonomous actors and agentic commerce will impact KYC and KYB procedures and what needs to evolve 

The combined market capitalization of major stablecoins now sits above $300 billion, roughly double what it was just two years ago. The growth has come increasingly from ordinary use cases—what was once primarily a crypto trading instrument is now the preferred way to move value for many businesses, particularly those operating across borders. 

Today, it’s relatively easy to hold and send stablecoins, especially with the growing number of exchanges and wallet providers on the market, but spending that value in the real world remains prohibitively difficult. Card networks have become the perfect bridge, connecting stablecoin value to more than 175 million merchant locations. For cardholders and merchants, the experience feels familiar, but behind the swipe, the infrastructure is doing something new. 

In this conversation, three of the players that make a stablecoin swipe possible—the network (Visa), the issuer (Rain), and the processor (Lithic)—sit down to explain how it all comes together, and what becomes possible when settlement moves onchain. 

Watch on-demand to learn more about: 

• How stablecoins went from a trading instrument to a practical way to move money, driven by regulatory progress and the ability to move funds 24/7 without intermediaries
• How cards bridge stablecoins to the existing merchant ecosystem, with real programs already running in cross-border payroll, corporate treasury and travel, and global neobanking
• The three trends to watch most closely: agentic payments, onchain finance, and the next phase of regulation

Stablecoin real-world payments hit $400 billion in 2025, representing about 1% of the entire M2 money supply. This is still just a fraction of total global payment volume, but the growth curve is steep enough that some of the biggest names in finance, from Western Union to PayPal, are starting to embed stablecoins into their products. 

Even so, the question of whether stablecoins are a passing trend or a permanent shift in how the world moves money remains. In this conversation, Alex Johnson from Fintech Takes sits down with Western Union global head of digital assets Malcolm Clarke and Rain CTO Charles Yoo-Naut to discuss the real problems stablecoins can—and are—solving. From expanding financial access to improving capital efficiency, this technology has real implications for businesses and consumers, and Malcolm and Charles are on the front lines. 

Watch on-demand to learn more about: 

• How the market is likely to shake out between a few dominant stablecoin issuers, brand-led entrants, and bank consortium efforts, and why some new stablecoins will attract real volume while others will have little utility 
• Why parking capital in correspondent banking gets expensive for a treasury team moving billions of dollars a year, and what changes when stablecoins replace it, using Western Union's own numbers
• How the GENIUS Act in the US and other emerging regulatory frameworks around the world are impacting how companies are building their products and why compliant and non-compliant tokens are likely to continue to coexist 
• Where the next wave of opportunity is forming, from on-chain FX settlement between different stablecoins and chains to the earliest experiments in programmable, agent-driven payments

Cardholders reach for the card that pays them back. In the US, 90% of credit card spend happens on rewards cards, and 55% of cardholders globally say rewards drive how they use their card. For stablecoin-backed cards to compete for top of wallet, a rewards program isn't a nice-to-have. It's table stakes.

Until now, standing one up meant vetting a rewards-as-a-service vendor, negotiating another contract, and building another integration, all before working out what the program would actually cost. Rain Rewards removes that layer: a tokenized points program built directly into the issuing platform, available as a free add-on to every Rain card program.

In this session, Ross Basri, who built the product, and Brian Alpatta from Rain's product marketing team walk through how it works, demo the live rewards experience inside the Avalanche app, and share the results of a 2,500-cardholder beta.

Watch on-demand to learn more about:

• How tokenized points work under the hood: an ERC-20 token unique to your program, earn rates configurable by category or individual merchant, and a flexible endpoint for rewarding referrals, welcome bonuses, and in-app engagement
• The end-user experience, demoed live in the Avalanche app: statement credits, a white-labeled travel portal for hotels and flights, and checkout that splits payment between points and cash
• What the beta showed: a 25% lift in daily spend when rewards were offered, roughly $70 more per cardholder per month, about $850 per year
• The economics of running a program: no upfront cost, charges only when points are redeemed, and how float and breakage work in your favor, plus what's next on the roadmap, from airline and hotel points transfers to merchant-funded offers and Solana support

AI agents can already research, write code, and run entire workflows. The next step is money. Agents that hold wallets, sign transactions, and spend within human-defined guardrails, with no click-to-approve step in between, are starting to move from demo to production.

That shift forces questions every payments builder now has to answer. Why do stablecoins (programmable, instantly settled, always on) keep coming up as the natural foundation for software that transacts? What does an agent actually need before it touches a cent? And when an agent buys the wrong thing, who is liable?

In this episode of Utila’s Stablecoin Builder Series, Head of Payments Shahar Friedman puts those questions to three teams building the answers: Rain’s Catherine Peng, Tempo’s Brendan Ryan, and Polygon Labs’ James Lawton.Watch on-demand to learn more about:

• Why programmable money and instant settlement fit agent-driven transactions, and where payment infrastructure designed for human buyers falls short
• The three things an agent needs before it can move money: verifiable identity, machine-readable authorization, and execution bound by policy
• How delegated authority, spending limits, and disputes change when the buyer is software, and why agent traces could make dispute resolution tighter than it is today
• What’s live now versus still emerging, from pay-per-call pricing for APIs, tools, and content to treasury operations that monitor balances and reconcile continuously

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