The Long Road to Trust | Tom Borgers, Co-Founder & CEO of Walapay

[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_00] This is the Crypto Hipster Podcast. This is not a traditional interview show. These are perspective-driven conversations with founders, builders, and independent creators shaping what comes next.

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_00] We go beyond headlines, beyond hype, and beyond price to explore ownership, freedom, and opportunity in the digital economy where builders talk freedom, not price. Hello and welcome back to the Crypto Hipster Podcast. This is your host, Jamil Hasan, the Crypto Hipster.

[00:00:55] [SPEAKER_00] And today I am joined by Tom Borgers, who is the co-founder and CEO of Wallet Pay. Tom's journey takes us from early Bitcoin and Ethereum through consensus and into the complicated reality of moving money across borders.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_00] He and his brother, Dimitri, have set out to address a problem that technology alone has not solved yet, and that's making financial infrastructure work across currencies, institutions, and countries. But today isn't about selling a payments platform. It's about those experiences, decisions, and convictions that led someone to build that platform. Tom, welcome to Crypto Hipster. Thank you for joining me today.

[00:01:40] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you for having me, Jamil. Excited for this conversation.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_00] You're very welcome. So let's start at the beginning. Let's start before consensus, right? Before Walapay. And what drew you first towards this world of cryptocurrencies?

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, well, you know, I think the place to start is really at the beginning. You know, my brother and I, we founded Walapay, as you mentioned. And we grew up initially in Belgium. So we're from Belgium originally, but kind of spent our whole childhoods moving from place to place. So, you know, we spent some time in the US, in Asia, in Latin America, Europe.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_01] So really, from quite early on, we were exposed to this idea of moving money around the world, right? Very basic things like sending money back home or, you know, getting paid in one currency and having to bring that into another. And this is back even before the last wave of fintechs were around. So before you had companies like Wise and Revolut making some of that already quite a bit easier for the traditional currency.

[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_01] So even when it came to moving, let's say, you know, dollars that you made doing some kind of freelance gig back to euros, you could encounter some friction just by going through your bank as you might typically do. Right? And so that was something that was always kind of in the back of our minds.

[00:03:10] [SPEAKER_01] And when Bitcoin, when the white paper was written, published, and you started getting some meaningful activity on Bitcoin, that, you know, pretty early on appealed to us as this concept of Internet native money. You know, that immediately resonated to us because we felt like the Internet was kind of our home in some ways. And, you know, despite moving around to different countries, that was always something that was, you know, omnipresent.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_01] And so, you know, I remember reading the white paper in its entirety back in 2013. And from then we started following this broader crypto space that has evolved. Right. Now, that said, when, you know, when we started really digging into it, it became pretty clear to us that Bitcoin by itself was not going to actually solve problems related to global money movement.

[00:04:08] [SPEAKER_01] But, you know, moving beyond Bitcoin, we saw the emergence of other networks like Ethereum and then Solana and so on. And then it became very clear to us that these are platforms that not only will, you know, evolve in terms of their technology and the throughput and things like that. But these are platforms that you can actually build systems on. Right.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_01] And that's when it became, you know, it started to click in our minds that this could be something that we can actually build on and potentially build solutions to our own problems on. Right. And that is eventually what brought me to consensus.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_00] Got it. So growing up internationally taught you that the world is flat, actually.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I mean, look, it what it what it certainly taught us is that, you know, we the world was like globalizing very much. Right. And we were going to be in different parts of the world and the need to move money still existed. Right. And so that that friction became pretty, pretty obvious to us.

[00:05:12] [SPEAKER_00] All right. You had the opportunity at consensus to work alongside the early the builders there. Right. What did what did what did working there teach you about the difference between, you know, technology, technological possibilities and reality?

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_01] That's a very good question. I think, you know, the early days of consensus were were very unique in the sense that it was an environment that really fostered emergent development, which is a property that you really needed at the time to develop these decentralized systems. Right. These were systems that were completely new.

[00:05:56] [SPEAKER_01] And the founder there, Joe, Joe Lubin, who was also a co-founder of Ethereum, really enabled innovative people and builders to to to build completely new systems unfettered. From the usual kind of restraints and constraints that you have in a company. And so obviously that can be a double edged sword. Right.

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_01] Right. In the beginning, it was incredibly useful because it allowed for the emergence of really foundational pieces of infrastructure in the crypto space. So wallets like MetaMask, you know, RPC providers like Infura and then clients like the initial like Basu client. And even before that, what was being built at Ethereum or sorry, at consensus.

[00:06:45] [SPEAKER_01] These were all like very early building blocks that enabled Ethereum to become successful over time. Right. Right. The other side of that coin is, of course, this was ultimately a pretty chaotic environment and not necessarily one that was very focused towards, you know, making profits and eventually becoming like a sustainable company.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_01] And so, you know, there was sometimes some friction there. But of course, you know, over time, consensus evolved quite a bit and eventually became a little bit more like a technology company rather than the incubator that it had started at.

[00:07:22] [SPEAKER_01] And so I think we, you know, I had the good fortune of kind of seeing that evolution take place where we went from a lot of ideas, a lot of builders and maybe less kind of focus on the bottom line to a company that actually internalized a lot of that technology and did so in a way that eventually led towards a successful, you know, tech company.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_00] Right. Right. I would say more successful tech company now than blockchain than the blockchain as far as Ethereum. So I don't know where the balance is going on that. But, you know, you build Wallet Pay, you know, with your brother, Dimitri. Right.

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_00] So how do two brothers, you know, building this technology company, how do you divide responsibilities when the stakes increase and the platform, you know, completely landscape changes and transforms?

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_01] Yes. Well, look, I think we are very lucky in the sense that, you know, Dimitri and I are quite complimentary in terms of what we do, what we want to do. And yet temperamentally, we're quite similar. So, you know, in terms of working together, I know this is not for everyone, right? Working with your siblings. But in our case, it was actually something that, you know, we'd always kind of talked about and we always wanted to do. It was a matter of what we were going to do, not if we were going to do anything.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_01] And I think a lot of that is because, right, like temperamentally, we're quite similar. So we work together really well. And then even more importantly, you know, we're very complimentary in terms of our skill sets. Right. So Dimitri was always more on the engineering side, on the technical side of things and has experience kind of both on on like pure and eng as well as product. And I have always been more on the commercial side of the business.

[00:09:18] [SPEAKER_01] Right. So, you know, I focus primarily on go to market, on our bank partnerships, things of that nature. And then Dimitri is much more focused on building out the actual product and the team behind that product.

[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_00] Great. So you have a so, OK, that feeds into my next question, because a lot of what you do is based on trust and you inherently trust each other because you're brothers, you know. But when money crosses, you know, institutions, you know, who ultimately owns the responsibility when something goes wrong?

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_01] Well, yeah, I think, you know, this is this is a very core problem and concept in all of finance. Right. Like who has the liability when when things go wrong? I mean, we you know, we are set up in such a way that. At Wallapay, we try to own as much of the stack as we can. And so we've built in a way where, you know, in a market that we enter, we try to get licensed there.

[00:10:25] [SPEAKER_01] We work directly with banks and we've built our API on top of that basic infrastructure. And when that's not possible, of course, you know, we rely on local financial institutions and bank partners to build on top of. But at the end of the day, you know, it's it's architected in such a way where the the liability kind of flows top to bottom.

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_01] Right. So if if we have a bank partner that is responsible for actually moving money and an issue happens there, then, of course, you know, the liability is with that that bank partner. And, you know, legally and contractually, we handle that through through throughout the chain of how money moves.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_00] Guys, so you came into the industry through Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that's when basically when, you know, the promise is out there that crypto was a blockchain was to bank the unbanked or in Celsius case, unbank yourself, which is what I did. You know, right. You're building relationships now with the very banking institutions that crypto originally promised to get rid of or bypass.

[00:11:35] [SPEAKER_00] Right. So is that a compromise of the original vision or, you know, is it is a genuine financial transformation?

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, well, I think, you know, the place to start here is is our vision over over the long term. We really do fundamentally believe that stable coins on top of public blockchains are the best way to move and manage money in a global context. Right. And so we actually believe that over time and these kind of, you know, shifts take a long time.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_01] It's not five years. It's not even 10 years. It can be 20, 30 years. Over time, what we see happening is that the wallet kind of replaces the bank account as the center of operations of a company or an individual. Right. So my wallet becomes the center of my financial life and the wallet becomes the center of a company's financial operations. Right. And then around that. And by the way, of course, that wallet lives on a blockchain.

[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_01] Right. Our permissioned ledger of or permissionless ledger of some kind. And then, of course, you know, that vision does not preclude the fact that banking within local markets and with local rails is not necessarily going away. Right. So what needs to happen, and this is exactly what Wallapay is focused on, is you need to build this connectivity layer.

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_01] To and from local rails so that you can have this center being on chain, but then, you know, you can still go in and out of local currencies and local banking rails in different markets. You know, if you think the U.S. banking system is going away, that is not really a an idea that meets practical reality when we're out in the market.

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_01] Right. So it's it's for our point of view, these systems will coexist. And realistically, what's going to happen is the on chain side of things is going to grow and grow and keep growing over the next few years. And we think eventually become kind of the center and then everything else is going to stay. But, you know, we're going to have very seamless interoperability between those systems. And that's really the challenge that Wallapay is trying to solve.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_00] You must interact with ability means increased speed.

[00:14:06] [SPEAKER_01] It means speed and even more than that, it means removal of friction, right? Friction in terms of friction can take the form of cost. It can take the form of speed. It can take the form of things going wrong. Right. So, you know, money getting lost in a bridge of some sort or because you have to rely on a set of intermediaries, you know, something can go wrong and we don't know who is responsible for what, as you kind of alluded to earlier.

[00:14:35] [SPEAKER_01] So making all of this seamless means removing all of that friction. Right.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_00] Right.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_01] God.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_00] So the friction we recently had, there was recently a Binance hack of a lot of money, right? And it turns out it was people caused and not the system caused, but it was an error with people, you know. And so I'm thinking, you know, what happens when, like, you get this really fast payment system and you have this frictionless payment system that moves money faster than the safeguards can respond to? What do you, what happens then?

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, this is an absolutely key point, right? Because what we see today is with the rise of AI, it is becoming dramatically more difficult to have proper controls over AI-driven, you know, fraud and money laundering and various other risks that are kind of inherent to dealing with money movement. Right.

[00:15:37] [SPEAKER_01] And so what happens is, you know, you have new technologies that come out and one of the primary reasons that they don't kind of spread immediately is because you have existing institutions that kind of see the risks of what that entails. Right. And so you've seen recently, for example, banks like JP Morgan have said, no, thank you. We're not going to allow agents to access our systems.

[00:16:05] [SPEAKER_01] And a lot of that is, you know, of course, they are positioning themselves commercially against that because they want to keep, you know, control over that. But there is very much, and we're seeing this like on the ground, there is definitely a risk to, you know, opening up the doors and letting AI kind of take the wheel. Right.

[00:16:27] [SPEAKER_01] And so there's always going to be this kind of back and forth and maybe two steps forward, one step back when it comes to this stuff. And it's something that we have to be as an industry. I mean, certainly we as Wallopay are looking very closely at this, but even I would say at the industry level, we have to be super proactive and responsive to this kind of risk.

[00:16:50] [SPEAKER_01] And we have to develop the proper safeguards and the proper controls for it, because ultimately that is what is going to enable or prevent us from actually growing as an industry. Right. And so, you know, when it comes to the Binance hack, I think, first of all, it's quite instructive that, you know, this is not a crypto hack in any real way. It's a hack that could have happened at a bank.

[00:17:15] [SPEAKER_01] And actually, if you've followed the news, right, similar-ish kind of hacks have been happening in other parts of the world. In France, for example, with a more traditional bank. So this will be very present over the next few years. And it's something that, you know, we as an industry have a responsibility to be on the forefront of.

[00:17:40] [SPEAKER_00] I'd agree with that. Yeah. So you work and you work in relationship. While your brother works in the back end building engineering, you're on the front end doing the relationship. So I'm sure that, you know, part of the job is to persuade banks and regulators and blockchain native businesses to cooperate, you know, even though you all, not y'all, I'm not from the South.

[00:18:08] [SPEAKER_00] You all have operate under different assumptions, right? So how do you do that? How do you persuade them when you have these different assumptions and they conflict?

[00:18:18] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Look, I think, you know, we've really tried to approach this by the book. And again, like when we go into a market, we try to get licensed where we need to. And, you know, we do try to work very collaboratively with banks because we recognize that, you know, that part of the global kind of money movement system isn't going away, right?

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_01] And the primary thing that we need to do when we work with these banks is basically convince them that we have the proper controls and compliance program in place to basically not become a risk to them, right? Every bank is a business, right?

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_01] And if it's interesting commercially, but also, you know, comes with the proper set of control, that can be something that's quite appealing. Now, you know, to be very clear, two, three years ago, the kinds of conversations that we're having now wouldn't even have taken place at all, right? We wouldn't have been led in the door.

[00:19:52] [SPEAKER_01] So there is a very material shift in terms of the, like, high-level perspective that banks now have around stablecoins and stablecoin-led money movement, which has allowed us to enter the door. But now that we're in the door, that's kind of the new challenge is making sure that we can persuade the banks of the risk-reward calculus, essentially.

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_00] Got it. Now that you're in the door, at what point does a payment founder become responsible for more than just the successful execution of a transaction and become responsible for something far greater?

[00:20:34] [SPEAKER_01] Well, that is a big question.

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_01] And these products to more and more people around the world and just make this a lot more seamless, right? Every, you know, every, like, friction that we can reduce should lead to more interoperability, more interactivity, and more economic activity that is flowing globally, right? It should be a net increase to GDP as we kind of reduce the barriers to doing so.

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_01] And especially enabling people in emerging markets, which has been kind of our focus from the beginning, to get access to the broader global economy, right? So that's always been our mission. And funny enough, yes, when you kind of boil it all the way down, it starts with doing the basic things very reliably, right?

[00:21:53] [SPEAKER_01] So just making sure that payments can execute from point A to B without there being any issues, that is really the foundation of trust in our system. And we need that trust to be able to actually build out the various different products and capabilities that we're looking to put out in the market.

[00:22:13] [SPEAKER_00] And trust is not something that was talked about before in the conversations at the door. So what belief did you have about crypto 10 years ago that you no longer have? And how has that transformed?

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I think I would say that my beliefs have not changed too much. They have actually been reinforced over that period of time, but it hasn't always been a straight line, right? So, you know, going back to what I said earlier about how we got into what we are doing today, it was initially through Bitcoin and actually this idea of an internet native money.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_01] What interested me about Bitcoin was internet native money. It was not digital gold, which it has effectively become, right? That was not the main kind of draw for my brother and I. What was interesting was initially the idea that, you know, you could have a truly global money. And then eventually that developed into an interest in building a truly global and neutral platform for finance, right?

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_01] It went from money to actually all of finance can then go on chain. And I would say that is how, you know, that is how our kind of interest and beliefs in crypto have developed over time. And I would say that along the way, there were many kind of deviations, many distractions. And I feel confident in saying that, you know, this was never something that we were quite interested in.

[00:23:54] [SPEAKER_01] So whether it was, you know, having a million different ICOs back in the 2018 kind of timeframe or a ton of different NFT related projects that didn't really need to go anywhere. These were things that were even more recently, you know, things like, you know, the different meme coins and so on.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_01] I have nothing necessarily against that because, you know, these are decentralized platforms and people should be able to do whatever they want with them. But that was never something that was really interesting to us and what we wanted to build. Right. So I would say that, again, ultimately what we're trying to do has never really changed.

[00:24:41] [SPEAKER_01] But we've certainly had some very interesting zigzags along the way in terms of what captured the global kind of imagination around crypto.

[00:24:53] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I'm really interested in those zigzags, you know, because I believe you're not just creating a faster payment infrastructure, which is great. I believe that you also have learned or learning what it's like to be responsible for moving other people's money and being accountable or responsible for that. So what so what's your deep what's your deeper commitment toward being being the person who is responsible for that?

[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, well, this goes back to creating a foundation of trust. Right. We have full conviction that that is the base of everything else that we can do is making sure that the very foundation of our infrastructure does what it says that it does. And it does so reliably and that people can actually trust us to execute money movement in different forms.

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_01] Right. That is really the kind of bedrock on top of which we can start building products for business customers, consumer customers, et cetera. And if we mess that up, you know, trust is a lot easier to lose than it is to gain.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_01] Right. So that is really the most important thing for me as a founder, for Dimitri and I as founders is to kind of maintain that trust and make sure that anything that we decide to do does not, you know, conflict with with that basic foundation.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Trust can take a lifetime to build and 60 seconds to lose. Yeah. So, yeah. So, let's see, 20 years from now, when people talk about Tom Borgers, what would you hope they remember about you that has nothing to do with Wallapay?

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_01] Well, that's quite a tricky question because a lot of, you know, our lives are now around Wallapay, right? Wallapay is a very central part of my life. But I think, you know, at the end of the day, you know, we hope to be remembered as founders, as people who left the world in a better place than, you know, we saw it coming in.

[00:27:18] [SPEAKER_01] Right. And that's a very kind of generic thing to say. But, you know, there's a reason why we're choosing to put our time and effort and energy into this versus to give you a very basic example that there are a lot of other things that we could do in the crypto space that are probably more immediately lucrative than than what we're doing now.

[00:27:40] [SPEAKER_01] Right. So, you know, we see this as a 2030 year project of building long lasting and sustainable infrastructure that hopefully, you know, allows the world to do better in the long run. And, you know, we hope that we can kind of leave with with that memory and give that to people.

[00:28:03] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. A lot of people don't have your time frame. So, you know, I just wonder if that changes the way that, you know, have had if the if more people in the industry took on your time frame and your commitment, you know, horizon, what do you think would be possible?

[00:28:28] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I, you know, I don't think it would be possible. Right. Because people are who they are. But I do think that if if people had this this kind of time frame, then we could instead of going, you know, two steps forward, one step back, we could just kind of keep marching forward.

[00:28:50] [SPEAKER_01] But I think, look, the the world is it's so dynamic and chaotic and unpredictable. Right. So even when people are trying to do things well and with the best of intentions, that can actually sometimes still lead to bad consequences. Right. Right. And so I'm not sure, you know, it's a very theoretical kind of a question.

[00:29:20] [SPEAKER_01] And I think for sure, like we would have had less setbacks or fewer setbacks rather. You know, I'm thinking FTX, I'm thinking, you know, even even before that, several issues like that. So we probably could have saved ourselves sometimes without some some time without those setbacks. But, hey, look, we can only focus on the world as it is. And so I think hopefully.

[00:29:49] [SPEAKER_01] As long as we focus on on what we're doing, we'll still kind of be able to do some good.

[00:29:57] [SPEAKER_00] Awesome. I agree. Sounds great to me. So I want to thank you very much for your time today. I have one last question and it's going to be easy when it's going to be how to people become a customer or client. Wallet Pay, how can they use your platform? How can they how can they find you?

[00:30:11] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, you know, we're Wallet Pay on most major social. So whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter, you can find us there. You can go to walletpay.io and submit our form at the bottom of the page. That's probably the best way to get in touch with us if you're interested in partnering or becoming a customer of Wallet Pay. And then you can always feel free to to DM me either on on Twitter. I'm Thomas Borgers or on LinkedIn. You'll find me at Tom Borgers.

[00:30:41] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you very much, Jamil. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you very much.