Future of Finance: Guillaume Poncin joins Alchemy from Stripe to help bring DeFi to the masses

Welcome to Future of Finance, where Fortune interviews prominent figures at major companies about their jobs, how their company fits into the crypto ecosystem, and what it all means for the way we use money.

After spending two years building the crypto team at payments company Stripe, Guillaume Poncin is moving to blockchain developer platform Alchemy to take on a new challenge as technical lead. Poncin has spent most of his career in engineering in the mainstream tech world, including a 12-year stint at Google, but he sees crypto as a catalyst for solving major financial problems on a global scale.

He recently sat down with Fortune to shed some light on his move into alchemy, what lessons crypto can learn from traditional finance and vice versa, and how blockchains can help people transfer value as easily as they transfer information.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

What interested you in crypto?

There’s the techie in me that says, ‘Hey, this is really cool.’ Things at scale with distributed consensus and the like. So from a technical perspective, super interesting – that took me down the rabbit hole. But if you think about it longer and think about the impact it can have on the world, there are many use cases that appeal to me in the crypto space. I think one that we worked on at Stripe was the idea that if you’re a creative in Argentina or a freelancer in a country that maybe doesn’t have a very stable currency, you can now get paid in stablecoins. This is a much better medium of exchange for you. Crypto makes implementation much, much easier.

You have a technical background. What do you think surprised you most about the financial side of crypto?

I had my degenerate moment: I was doing leveraged yield farming and obviously didn’t know anything about what I was doing, and so I lost a lot of money. I mean, not a lot of money, it was like gambling money. I think the more you get into it, the more you realize, “Hey, there’s quite a bit of depth in this.” There have been decades of financial innovation, and we’re kind of going back and taking new steps here. But there is a lot to learn in the financial system. And the more I read about it, the more I want to read about it, and there’s just this huge rabbit hole: There’s a lot here, and it was all created for a reason. You can begin to understand how everything works by following the steps. I find it scientifically very, very interesting. But it’s also a recognition that the majority of Web3 has yet to be built. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface, and there is so much we can learn from the evolution of finance, other industries, and even the evolution of social networks over time.

What did you do at Stripe and why did you take on the role at Alchemy?

I had the opportunity to build a crypto team within Stripe and focus on some of the very traditional Stripe problems, like moving money globally and accepting payments, etc., but also looking at what it means to have a billion users to integrate into Web3? So that was the challenge, so to speak: Can we get a billion users to routinely use blockchain and crypto? So with Stripe the focus was mostly on that, and I think Alchemy was kind of a logical step: “Can I take this to a much higher level?” I’m more familiar with the infrastructure layer than the finance layer, so it made a lot of sense to me , to have a higher level of Alchemy to achieve the goal of onboarding the next billion users to Web3.

Where can you have the most impact at Alchemy?

I think onboarding many, many users is probably the motivation. Alchemy is, to me, an extremely interesting place to do this because it’s one of those companies that actually sees what everyone wants. I think Stripe had a certain privileged position in the payments space. It’s very similar. What I think can contribute is that a lot of people think of Alchemy as the RPC node provider and then we started adding APIs on top of that. I think it’s just the beginning of the story. As we continue to strive to become even more reliable and scalable, we will be able to support much larger enterprise customers. And at the same time, try to expand into new ideas, new markets, whatever the next big thing is, maybe app chains, multi-chain, multi-region, any number of these types of expansions. When you try to do that as a startup, at some point you realize that you have to start organizing the great talent that you have, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at that. I hope that I can contribute and somehow maintain the speed and speed of execution that a small startup usually has.

What lessons do you think crypto could learn from traditional finance? How about the other way around?

What excites me about cryptocurrencies, which I would like to emulate in traditional finance, is the speed of iteration. You can try your thing and it works or it doesn’t, and then you can move incredibly quickly in the crypto space. A lot of ideas are terrible, but you can repeat them and get to something really cool. I love this. I love this speed of iteration. Stripe has made it very clear that if you want to make a transfer in the US, you have to use ACH, which takes five days. I know there are systems that are faster and coming online, but trying to close this gap in terms of the iteration cycle would make a big difference in the speed of innovation in this area. In contrast, I think cryptocurrencies have a lot to learn from traditional finance. In a way, I think crypto is retracing all the steps of the last 200 years of traditional finance, stumbling into the same potholes in places and rediscovering some rules. We could probably go through this even quicker if we look at what happened there.

What are your views on US crypto regulation?

I think there is progress. There is a lot of exercise, some I like, some I may not like, but it’s all personal preference. I am pleased that there is activity in the legislative area. This should provide clarity and make our lives as developers in the Web3 space much easier. From an alchemy perspective, we are perhaps a level deeper away from it, so it has less immediate impact. But we’re seeing more and more developers in the Web3 space – we’ve quadrupled the number of teams we work with since the beginning of last year – and many of these teams are having to deal with difficult and uncertain legal environments, which I’m actually very excited about , that there is a lot of activity and interest there.

What do you think is missing to attract the next million people to crypto?

I have children, teenagers. I would like to introduce them to crypto. You have a Revolut account. Why don’t they have a crypto wallet? It’s incredibly complicated. I don’t want to do that today. It shouldn’t be any harder than opening an account with an online bank, but it is. I tried to open a bank account for my wife – for my wife’s business – and it took a week of back and forth. All of this is crazy friction. I hope crypto becomes as easy as getting an email address.

What do you think are the biggest technical challenges in Alchemy’s business, which enables billions of on-chain transactions??

Blockchain has a very unique technical problem. All code is open source. Anyone can run a node on the blockchain. It’s a decentralized network, it’s peer-to-peer. If you want to do this in your garage, you can do that. As a hobby project, you can easily talk directly to the blockchain. But if you’re a big company, if you’re a startup in that space and you’re starting to gain traction, it becomes incredibly difficult to do it yourself. Because now you have to maintain multiple nodes. They must be in harmony with each other. You need to worry about scaling or an increase in traffic. All of this work is essentially something that is increasingly becoming a specialized skill. And if you’re building an NFT marketplace, you might not want to devote half of your company to developing these capabilities. The idea behind Alchemy and where we can help is to make this all much, much easier.

What do you think is the future of finance?

In layman’s terms, since I don’t know much about finance, I would like it if the future of finance was programmable money, if you will. In very simple terms, I want to be able to have a bucket of money, create a bucket of money, move money between buckets, and then exchange money with others. I want to deal with it the way I handle information, have very handy tools, and be able to tell my Alexa device to move money between accounts. All of this should be programmable and very, very easy to use.

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