The Last Unsolved Layer in Global Stablecoin Payments

The international visibility gap

Nikhil Srinivasan says new payment rails create visibility gaps, an insight he took from Sardine. The gap, he argues, is on the international side: there are strong tools for visibility into American accounts, but less on the other leg. He also says stablecoin processors are "no different than any other fintech" and carry the same concentration and portfolio risks for banks.

He says people treat compliance as static, but requirements and controls across partners have changed over the last year. For Infinite, he says, compliance is as much program management and expectation setting with partners as it is a technical problem.

Lessons from Sardine and Coinbase

Nikhil Srinivasan led compliance at Sardine while his co-founder led payments, and the co-founder worked on one of the first virtual account programs in the market. Infinite's first hire was their former Sardine chief compliance officer, who had moved to SoCure. Following advice from Monzo founder Tom, a YC partner, to "go bare metal," the company takes a vertically integrated approach to compliance and fraud data.

From Coinbase, he says, he learned that surviving crypto cycles and trying ideas at the right time, with market pull, matter.

Partners, not rivals

Nikhil Srinivasan says Infinite competes with dLocal and Wise as a global B2B payments provider, while it sees local stablecoin processors such as Bitso, Trace Finance, Conduit, Yellow Card, BVNK and Bridge as allies. He says its platform is generalized to support any provider, much as Coinbase generalized its platform for different blockchains.

Agents as customers

Infinite designed its compliance review process around AI agents from day one, Nikhil Srinivasan says. He expects digital commerce to 10x through ChatGPT and Claude, but sees agent-to-agent shopping as the bigger opportunity, and thinks foundation model companies may become payment companies.