Trade Finance, AI Research and Investing, and Tokenized Collateral with Keyrails CEO Berhan Kongel

Why the mix flipped

Berhan Kongel, who says he used to be "a USDC guy" at Arf, describes Circle as the more institutional option built around treasury yields. He says Tether USDt has very robust distribution and "massive penetration" in Africa, Latin America and South Asia.

He says the swap function is market neutral: Keyrails connects to several liquidity providers, picks the best price and passes all gains and losses to clients. The company charges 3 to 5 basis points for the entire payment. In one case, he says, a client paying two basis points gained from a three and a half basis point delta and came out 0.5 basis points ahead.

Trade financing as a service

Keyrails launched Stable OS 2.0 on May 13, supporting 75+ currencies through a single wire instruction. Kongel says the next step is white-labeled trade financing that fintechs and financial institutions can resell. He says the company is a SWIFT member with direct banking everywhere, and that clients can send and receive SWIFT payments from a USDT wallet without a bank account.

He points to a trade financing shortage in Africa of $140 billion a year, where rates can reach 15% per month. He says Keyrails pricing could be around 20 to 25%. With 80% of a facility held as collateral in T-bills earning another 5%, he says, cost of capital falls to 15%. Clients with a three-month trade history with the company would qualify.

Deeds as collateral

Kongel says the Dubai Land Department is tokenizing property deeds for fractional ownership, under full regulation. He expects a fraction of a Palm villa to secure a credit facility, because it can be sold on secondary markets "in five seconds if the secondary market is big enough."

Agents for analysis, not coffee

Berhan Kongel says an AI agent produced a SpaceX report that would take a top analyst two weeks, at a cost of $1.87. He compares the focus on retail agentic payments to the question he heard about Bitcoin by 2018: why it could not buy coffee. He expects agents to read secondary-market oracle pricing and act on it.