2026-11-03 –, Lightning Stage
Stablecoins are permissionless onchain, but the moment value must become local fiat, most systems fall back to custodians, proprietary liquidity and unverifiable offchain events. This talk shares a protocol design for routing fiat liquidity through independent providers using per-order escrow, commitments and payout attestation—and the production lessons behind it.
Drawing on lessons from operating Paycrest across 45,000+ stablecoin–fiat settlements, this talk examines three hard problems in the fiat last mile: discovering real liquidity, making providers commit to execution, and proving that an offchain payout actually happened. I’ll show how per-order escrow, quote/commit flows and payout attestation can address these problems without requiring a central treasury to custody funds, alongside key lessons from failures in production. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for thinking about stablecoin↔fiat infrastructure as an open liquidity market rather than another closed ramp.
Chibuotu Amadi is co-founder of Paycrest, where he works on open infrastructure for stablecoin–fiat payments. He has spent 7+ years building in crypto, including at ConsenSys and Gitcoin, with work spanning cross-chain systems and public-goods tooling. He now focuses on making the fiat edge of crypto more open, verifiable, and non-custodial.