Stabledash Live · May 27 · 28 min

Payments Is Commoditizing: 1kx's Nichanan Kesonpat on the Stablecoin Investment Thesis

With Nichanan Kesonpat

Key takeaways

Hark, an AI lab building personal intelligence, raised $700M in Series A funding, the Stabledash episode reported.
Nichanan Kesonpat says stablecoin payments is commoditizing and margins keep compressing, and she expects orchestrators to use auditable payment history for trade finance underwriting.
She calls WalletConnect Pay a natural next step for WalletConnect, because the company has already aggregated a majority or a large share of wallets.

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Summary

A 1kx principal argues that as stablecoin payment margins shrink, orchestrators will move into trade finance, yield and point-of-sale products.

Hark, an AI lab building personal intelligence, raised $700M in Series A funding, according to a Stabledash Live episode. On the same show, Nichanan Kesonpat, a principal at 1kx, said the stablecoin payments layer is commoditizing and that margins are still compressing.

Payments margins compress

Nichanan Kesonpat says the GENIUS Act led to a wave of startups doing cross-border stablecoin orchestration, which produced companies like Bridge and BBNK, and that these have had successful exits. She adds that payments is commoditizing and margins keep compressing as the industry takes on the cost problems of correspondent banking.

She says Europe and the US have gone furthest in setting up frameworks that tell startups how to operate legally, pointing to MiCA and the GENIUS Act.

“The next wave of of crypto users now aren't like crypto natives necessarily, but they're using just a product that happens to use blockchain under the hood to do to pay their vendors or to, you know, send money back to their families”

Nichanan Kesonpat

From payments to credit

Nichanan Kesonpat expects orchestrators to verticalize. Because onchain payment flows can be audited and have regular volumes, she says that payment history could become "a nice basis for short term underwriting" in trade finance. She also says orchestrators are adding tokenized money market funds so their customers can earn yield on treasury balances. Host Zach Fowler suggested she talk to CreditCoop, which he said is doing trade financing with Rain.

WalletConnect at the till

One of Nichanan Kesonpat's first memos at 1kx was on WalletConnect, which the firm described as the "narrow waist thesis" for wallets and dApps. WalletConnect Pay now comes first on the company's website, and she calls the move a natural next step because WalletConnect has already aggregated a majority or a large share of wallets.

New founders, new markets

Nichanan Kesonpat says the founder profile 1kx looks for has changed. A few years ago it was hacker-type DeFi protocol builders. Now it is usually people from fintech or TradFi. She points to Sam Broner, who left a16z to build a better money company. She says stablecoin legislation is appearing in Brazil, Bahrain, the Emirates and Asia, and that CBDCs are a hot topic in Asia, a subject she discussed on a panel with the Bank of Thailand.

Taken together, Nichanan Kesonpat describes a market where moving stablecoins is becoming a cheap utility, so the value moves to credit, yield and distribution. Beyond that, she sees agentic finance, which joins AI agents with onchain services, as a zero-to-one opportunity.

WalletConnect, 1kx, Allium, and Bank of Thailand come up most.

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