Conversations about stablecoins have a way of turning into conversations about technology. Any series, any standard, which rail. When Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS, sat down with… Bowls CEO Glenn Sussman In the “Monday Conversation” series, I put a more pointed question on the table. “How many rods do we need?”
The real answer is probably less than what is currently under construction, and Sussman did not dispute that point. What he offered instead was this. The question, although valid, targets the wrong target. Counting bars is a technological exercise. The thing being disputed is actually older, duller, and much more important.
It is the deposit.
Stablecoin hit
Sussman has watched the mood inside the banks swing violently enough to shock a person.
“For two or three years, you literally couldn’t mention the word blockchain within a bank without getting hit in the head,” he said. “And now all of a sudden, everyone is getting hit in the head for not having a digital asset strategy.”
This shift, from occupational hazards to occupational requirements in about 24 months, explains a lot about the current landscape, including its less attractive features, he said. Banks, payments networks, underlying service providers, and crypto-native companies are powering token deposit systems and stablecoin infrastructure at a speed that is beginning to look less like condemnation and more like insurance. No one wants to be the organization that has to explain to the board why it’s not doing anything.
Sussman is candid about what he produces. He said that outside of major global institutions, he sees very little real commitment to any particular model. What he sees is “a lot of choice preservation.” Pilots joined, experience accumulated, bets were hedged, and nothing was irreversible.
He is careful not to criticize. He lived the alternative. Tassat has managed blockchain-based settlement platforms for Signature Bank and Customers Bank, which means Sussman knows first-hand what it takes to keep a real-time environment open around the clock while keeping it in sync with platforms designed in a different century.
“People underestimate the work it takes,” he said.
Which brings the issue of strategy back into focus. A premium deposit network without users is not a strategy. A stablecoin connection cannot reproduce a service already offered by a larger competitor, at significant cost. Sussman’s advice to banks is to experiment “lightly and opportunistically” and remain ruthless about what lies on the other side of the investment.
“Banks should focus on building their businesses, not just building pooled infrastructure,” he said.
The arithmetic no one does on stage
Here the conversation about architecture stopped.
Stablecoin reserves, on today’s scale, are a rounding error against the US deposit base. This is the only reason the industry can still discuss stablecoins as a payments innovation story, Sussman said. Change the denominator and the story changes with it.
“When you talk about a $5 trillion or $10 trillion stablecoin volume, that giant sucking sound is going to be all the deposits leaving all the regional and community banks,” Sussman said.
The mechanics of this outcome are not complicated, and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous, Sussman said. Every dollar of stablecoins in circulation is backed by something. That something is cash and high-quality liquid assets, and it needs to be kept somewhere.
Today, “somewhere” means a short list of large institutions that have the preservation infrastructure, balance sheet capacity, and operational capacity for large-scale permanent settlement.
So that the money does not disappear. It’s moving. A $4 billion deposit that was sitting in a bank worth $4 billion in Ohio, to fund loans in that bank’s market, becomes a reserve balance parked in an institution that has never heard of Ohio. Community Bank is not losing its payments product. He loses the deposit.
And this is the part of the stablecoin conversation that regional bankers haven’t fully grasped yet. It redefines what “having a digital asset strategy” is supposed to achieve. The goal was never to own railways. The goal is to avoid being excluded from their deposit base one by one.
Giving regional banks a seat at the digital assets table
It is the clearest way to understand what TASS is building now.
Under Sussman, who has been CEO for about a year, the company has organized around three fronts. Capital markets for digital assets, token banking products and stablecoin infrastructure. Lynq, a real-time settlement and collateral network backed by treasury tokens, is on the capital markets side. TASSAT is also supplying technology for interbank token deposit efforts.
The part that aims to solve the regional bank deposit problem is the NENYA project, which was introduced in July 2026 and is scheduled to launch in early 2027. NENYA is designed to help stablecoin issuers distribute reserves across fiat deposits and tokenized high-quality liquid assets. On the other side of that deal, giving banks a way to compete for those balances.
Tassat is not proposing to move anyone’s money faster, Sussman said. It proposes opening a market that is currently closed by default. Right now, the stablecoin’s source reserves are where the plumbing actually goes, which means it’s reaching the biggest players. NENYA’s premise is that reserve deposits should be something a mid-sized bank can promote in terms of price and terms, the way it competes for any other commercial deposit relationship, rather than something it watches trickle down on its way to a custodial office in Manhattan.
Not a railway, but an auction, more or less. It is a materially different bet from the bet made by most of the market.
Sussman believes the distinction is about to become very important, because he expects basic infrastructure to become a commodity. When issuing a token and moving a token become stakes on the table, and he believes they will, technical achievement ceases to be an advantage. What remains is liquidity, distribution and applications.
“What everyone is focusing on today is mind share and market share,” he said. “And that’s where the game is won.”
The assumption everyone makes
There is a pregnant assumption under all this, and Webster gives it a name before the conversation is over.
Every forecast of trillions of stablecoins, every warning about deposit flight, and every business case built on both, depends on ordinary trading customers deciding that stablecoins are worth switching to. Not interesting. Not innovative. better.
“It goes back to the use cases for stablecoins,” Webster said. “Someone has to think it’s good enough or better than what they’re using today in order to generate demand.”
Sussman doesn’t dispute that. He admits that applications that would largely justify the build process have not yet been created. “Stablecoins will need to thrive in software use cases and applications, many of which are yet to be developed,” he said.
Which they both agreed leaves the industry in an unusual and somewhat ridiculous position. An enormous amount of capital was deployed against a demand curve that no one had ever seen. The bars were put in place. Virtual passengers.
Sussman’s argument is that this is precisely why megabanks spend their money on customers rather than on plumbing. And why the organization that ultimately becomes important may not be the one that built the best network, but the one that made sure its customers had a reason to be there.
In other words, the bars will be built either way. Deposits are something worth fighting for.
