In this Crypto Trailblazers interview, theCUBE + NYSE Wired co-host Gemma Allen sits down with Farooq Malik, chief executive officer of Rain, to explore exactly how stablecoin infrastructure is reshaping the foundations of global finance. Malik details Rain’s rapid growth, including its surge in valuation and recent Series C raise, and explains the company’s mission to deliver “dollars-as-a-service” through tokenized money movement. He outlines how embedding transaction data directly into digital tokens is unlocking faster settlement, lower costs and broader access to financial services for enterprises and consumers alike.
The conversation also examines institutional adoption, regulatory momentum and the competitive divide between banks that modernize and those that resist change. Malik discusses Rain’s role as an infrastructure partner for payroll providers, remittance firms and payment networks, as well as its early leadership in weekend and holiday settlements. From agentic commerce and microtransactions to global compliance and multi-chain deployment, he offers a forward-looking view of how programmable money is enabling new business models and accelerating the transition from legacy rails to scalable, software-defined finance.
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Farooq Malik, Rain
In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
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Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
play_circle_outlineRain Achieves Weekend and Holiday Visa Settlement for Payroll, Remittances, Merchant Payments, Earned Wage Access and Cross‑Border Contractor Pay
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineAgentic commerce and microtransactions enabled by stablecoins' fractional decimal capabilities.
In this Crypto Trailblazers interview, theCUBE + NYSE Wired co-host Gemma Allen sits down with Farooq Malik, chief executive officer of Rain, to explore exactly how stablecoin infrastructure is reshaping the foundations of global finance. Malik details Rain’s rapid growth, including its surge in valuation and recent Series C raise, and explains the company’s mission to deliver “dollars-as-a-service” through tokenized money movement. He outlines how embedding transaction data directly into digital tokens is unlocking faster settlement, lower costs and broader ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is Rain, what mission is it pursuing, and why are investors excited about it?add
Why did you build infrastructure for tokenized money (assuming it could become legal tender), and why did you choose to start with card-payment infrastructure?add
What are the most obvious early use cases or “low‑hanging fruit” adopters for this model (for example, are neobanks the primary candidates)?add
How could the convergence of agentic commerce, AI-driven workflows, and stablecoins align to enable much faster, lower-cost transactions (for example, microtransactions and fractional API billing)?add
>> Welcome back to TheCUBE. I'm Gemma Allen coming to you from our studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is our Crypto Trailblazers program, a program with NYSE Wired, where we talk to the builders and breakers who are redefining the world of traditional finance. Joining me now is Farooq Malik, CEO of Rain. Farooq, welcome to the show.
Farooq Malik
>> Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> So you have had a phenomenal year. You have 20X'd your company's valuation in a year. You just raised a series C at 250 million, bringing the company to an overall valuation of 1.95 billion.
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Let's start there. Talk to me. Tell me, what is Rain? What is the mission you're solving and what it is that investors are so excited about?
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah. Rain is a stable coin infrastructure company. We're focused on providing the net new rails for all financial transactions, powered by tokenized money movement, and servicing a global customer base with a single API.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. And you describe this as dollars-as-a-service, right? Working with traditional enterprise players, making global payments streamlined and seamless to stablecoin.
Farooq Malik
>> That's right.
Gemma Allen
>> The world of enterprise payments, it doesn't necessarily resonate with agility and speed. We think about all of the problems of old, right? Regulation, FX rates, all of those things that can make this world seem somewhat stiff. Talk to me about how stablecoin can fundamentally change the rewiring of those fights.
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah. Stablecoins are, in a way, the natural evolution of financial money movement. So if you think about society, we've spent thousands of years getting to cash as the ultimate primitive for transactions. And then we've spent the last several decades making it a lot more complicated because we've had to create electronic versions of money movement. And so we've built all these electronic money movement systems where messaging moves at the speed of light, but reconciliation moves at the speed of human beings. And so you send a transaction and then you have to reconcile it and there's a lot of corresponding institutions that have to flow the funds through their systems. And then ultimately at the end, then you get the dollars out the other side. With Stablecoins, you can actually put the transaction data and the messaging and the programmatic routing into the individual token itself. And then that money can actually flow from one person to another immediately, you can reconcile that transaction immediately. You can add value, you can split that money and send that to other folks that have an economic interest in that transaction immediately. And that creates the opportunity to drive massive cost savings and efficiency gains for institutional players. But then also, stablecoins create the opportunity for people that don't have institutional access to dollar correspondence to hold dollars and spend dollars and send dollars in a way without the same level of intermediaries involved, which increases the addressable universe of folks that can engage in the financial system, both on the corporate side, as well as the consumer side. It also reduces the barriers and cost of providing those transactions. So it's a massively better way to transact and it's the natural evolution of where financial service is going anyways.
Gemma Allen
>> So you've got some very large industry clients and players. Western Union, I believe, newly.
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Big, big payroll providers. Tell me how the business you envisioned versus the one you're running now has changed from a use case perspective. Has there been any big surprises on this journey?
Farooq Malik
>> The biggest surprise for us has been the speed of adoption. We always expected that tokenized money was going to have its moment in the sun, that's why we started the company. When we started the company in 2021, we were looking at research papers being published by the Bank of International Settlements, other central banks globally, the Federal Reserve here, and realizing that large institutions like central banks were exploring tokenized money, CBDCs, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, as a key cog in their policy quiver, or key arrow in their policy quiver so that they can solve institutional efficiency problems of the traditional financial system. We expected that central banks who have thought a lot about monetary policy and money movement broadly would ultimately win out in terms of where they see the industry going. And we built all the infrastructure assuming that, hey, if tokenized money becomes legal tender, that means that any institution that has anything to do with money, whether it's an institution that's a bank or a platform or marketplace or a payroll company or a bank or a investment broker, anybody that stores, sends or receives money is going to have to add this layer of software tooling to let them make sense of this future of money, right? Which means that if you think about the broader economic opportunity, that means that every institution that touches money needs to upgrade their systems. The addressable universe of that is massive. That's every institution, everywhere in the world, every person, everyone in the world needs to actually create that opportunity to upgrade to this new layer of money. And for us, that was the economic opportunity we were going after. We started with card payment infrastructure largely because the distribution problem had been solved by players like Visa and MasterCard on merchant acceptance, right? So if you can spend Philippines pesos at a merchant in the United States or in Columbia, you can spend stablecoins there. And we also started with that because card payment infrastructure is the most complex. Transactions are very complicated. There's all sorts of edge cases in card payments. And our thesis was that let's start with the most difficult problems, and then transferring funds is easy. What we've been really surprised by is the speed at institutional adoption. Regulatory clarity coming in has really opened up the floodgates of institutions that have been sitting on the sidelines for the last several years, thinking about what this means for their business, whether they're going to get disrupted, whether there's economic opportunity to expand their footprint. And that's been what we've been fielding over the last several years, and that's really accelerated over the last 12 months.
Gemma Allen
>> So in the credit card space, I think it's an example we can all understand, right? This idea that you can swipe a credit card and receive instant receivables as an issuer through stablecoin mechanisms, like through a company like yours, it's certainly very attractive, right? It's very attractive to a bank. They also have a lot of hamstrung challenges, I'm sure, when it comes to adopting these technologies. But you are providing the API, you're providing the infrastructure, the tech stack, right?
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> They are the marketing face of this, essentially.
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah, of course.
Gemma Allen
>> How are those partnerships playing out? How straightforward and streamlined are those conversations becoming? Do you see a world where every main bank will just be doing this across the board? How fast is it happening?
Farooq Malik
>> The reality is that whenever there's technological innovation, there's going to be winners and there's going to be losers. This is just the inevitability of life, right? We are seeing institutions that are engaging with the technology infrastructure, they have a lot of good ideas, and they have ideas on where this fits into their broader strategy. On the other side, there's a lot of institutions that are afraid. They're afraid of change. They're afraid of something different. They're afraid of having to upgrade their infrastructure. They're afraid of having to figure out what this means and what this doesn't mean for their compliance controls, regulatory controls, lots of different things. There's a lot of institutions today that still aren't even on real time money movement from FedNow or RTP. They're still stuck on the last generation of ACH and wire, which has been around for the better part of almost 50 years. And so just like every innovative trend, there's always going to be institutions that go ahead long into it, and then they will be successful on the other side. There's other institutions that are going to get left behind. And the challenge and the opportunity that we see is that how can Rain be that addressable partner to actually come and help you figure out what this means for your business, what this means for your institution, where are the efficiencies to be gained in how you do things today and help smaller institutions that may not have a dedicated team focusing on this actually not only survive, but also thrive on the other side of this financial expansion that's taking place.
Gemma Allen
>> Tell me what's happening globally. You've lived quite a global life yourself. We talked off camera about the many places you've lived. There's certainly been somewhat of a major rebrand around cryptocurrency and stablecoins in particular here in the US of late with the Genius Act and different piece of policy legislation that's coming into play. But globally, I think the perception is that some markets are ahead and some markets are still more skeptical, right? What are you seeing?
Farooq Malik
>> You're absolutely right. A lot of markets are ahead. Many markets are behind. Some countries are still figuring out what this means. The challenge is, is that we've been living in a globalized economy for a long time, right? But nation states, and central banks in every country have tried to either embrace that or resist it, right? And so similar to the same frameworks that have evolved around currency controls, imports, exports, tariffs, et cetera, there's countries that view this as a opportunity to leapfrog their technology stack and provide access to financial services to a broad subset of their populations that doesn't have access to financial services today. There's other industries, countries that are thinking about this as, "Hey, we are a financial hub for the traditional financial system. We have large institutions here. We want to create protectionist barriers from some of the technology advancement that's taking place elsewhere." And I mean, the good part for us is that whichever way the industry develops, like Rain has built a very infrastructure-agnostic solution so that if, let's say, tomorrow country A decides to build a private blockchain that only their country is going to run, they have their own CBDC issued by the central bank, every financial institution in that country can still use Rain infrastructure to provide utility to that token. In a different market, you have multiple bank deposits that are being tokenized. You have multiple stablecoin issuers. This is probably where the United States is going to end up, where we're going to have lots of banks issuing tokenized deposit products. We're going to have consortiums of banks issuing stablecoins. We're going to have private stablecoin issuers. The reality is, is that consumers will need all of those things to work like real money. If you can't do the things that you would do with a dollar bill, with $1 stablecoin, it's not going to pass the utility test for consumer mass adoption or institutional mass adoption.
Gemma Allen
>> And where's the low hanging fruit do you think in that model? Is it neobanks? Who is the most obvious straight off out of the gate use case for this world?
Farooq Malik
>> You'd be surprised to know that a lot of our customers are in every single industry bucket, right? So we have payroll companies that are doing cross border contractor payroll. We have domestic payroll companies that are doing earned wage access or institutional sort of money supply for frontline workers. We have remittances companies who are working with Western Union to expand their footprint of stablecoin powered users around the world. We're working with merchant processors and PSPs so that consumers who are paying businesses in stablecoin, the business can access those funds 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rain notably is the first company to have ever done a transaction on a weekend that was settled with Visa ever, right? We were the first company ever to do that on holiday. And so there's a lot of really interesting things that are technically possible now that then, if you think about large opportunities for other innovators, there's innovation that can now happen that was previously blocked, right? And that is going to unlock products and services that we haven't imagined yet. And that's the really exciting part, right? So the low hanging fruit is really about let's provide the same level of financial product or service. Stablecoins give you working capital efficiencies, servicing efficiencies, reduction in risk and settlement timelines. That boils down to a lower cost of servicing a customer, which boils down to a lower breakeven cost, which means that you can onboard more customers and you can grow faster.
Gemma Allen
>> Let's talk about the tech stack for a second. And perhaps too, the world of agentic, right? This idea of swarm agents, managing APIs, because there's a big impression, particularly in the crypto and stablecoin space that it's about speed, right? It's like building on the fastest infrastructure layer possible. What are your thoughts? Where do you see this convergence of tech aligning in some sort of fortuitous way to make things even faster than they are right now?
Farooq Malik
>> Agentic commerce is a really large focus for us right now. We have a number of clients that are building agentic solutions. It's really exciting, on top of our infrastructure. The other side of it is that stablecoins reduce the fixed cost of transacting on legacy infrastructure, right? So if you look at open loop networks that have existed for a while, there's a fixed cost for facilitating a transaction, and that's a legacy of the fact that it used to cost a fair bit of time and resources to actually run that transaction through legacy technology, right? And with stablecoins, the decimal system, you can go into like six decimals, so micro-transactions are now possible. If you look at a lot of these agentic workflows or AI, API calls, et cetera, like billing systems are delineated or denominated in fractions of a penny, right? So without stablecoins, you need that to round up to a penny to actually bill it. Whereas with stablecoins, you actually don't, right?
Gemma Allen
>> And these customers who are building these agentic models on your infrastructure, give me some crazy example that we might not necessarily guess. Can you talk me through something?
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah. There's people building, like personal shoppers. So you just send them a photo and the agent is out there doing the shopping for you and sending stuff to your house and they're doing that on a payment credential issue to the agent, not to you. So there's a lot of really cool stuff like that happening. There's other agentic solutions where two agents are coordinating the buying of selling of products and services separately, and then they're transacting and sending settlement between each other. So there's a lot of really cool things like that that people are building. There's a lot of really awesome, unique use cases that we're not allowed to talk about. And so, but rest assured that this is something that is emerging quite rapidly.
Gemma Allen
>> This company, we spoke at the beginning, like an incredible amount of growth in a short space of time, huge amount of money raised. I mean, first off, I should ask you, what are you going to do with this 250 million? Where is this money pumping back in? And talk to me a little bit about this investment process. You said you were oversubscribed for all three rounds. Talk me through what it's been like, what that investor conversation has been like.
Farooq Malik
>> We were very fortunate for the series A, we were preempted by our insiders that saw the velocity of the business. We were buoyed by a lot of the regulatory clarity that was coming in from federal regulators and a lot of the demand that was coming in from institutions that kind of saw the writing on the wall with the Genius Act and they expected it to pass and they were wanting to be first past the gate, right? They wanted to start thinking about what this meant for their business. They wanted to engage with people that had the experience. And by the time we got to the series B, we had already signed a lot of these large enterprises that we were in production with and providing solutions to. And then since then, we have been chatting with other folks. And I mean, the other side of being an institutional solution is that your institutional partners are LPs in a lot of these investment firms. And so we had a lot of inbound from folks that were interested in what we were doing on the technology side and infrastructure side. And I think it's been a great vote of confidence for our team, in our team so that they've been able to execute and grow and continue staying on the rails as kind of the infrastructure has scaled. And today, we have the only at-scale solution with stablecoin infrastructure that's natively deployed on over a dozen different blockchains. We support several dozen stablecoins today. We have the most flexible, agnostic, scaled stack so that anybody can come to us and you know that you're getting the solution that's been in the market longest, that's moved the most money and has done it for the most people without incident.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. And tell me in terms of the company growth, you said you've had 15 people, now you're at 80, I think you said?
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> And you're also looking at kind of global growth from a location perspective. What's on the map there?
Farooq Malik
>> Yeah. So a lot of the resources that we've raised over this last year are being dedicated to continuing to expand, continuing to adapt our business for the regulatory clarity that's coming in. As you can imagine, many countries are now starting to move now that the United States has decided to move on the regulatory front, and that creates both opportunities, but also challenges, right? So for us as a fast-growing technology company, the opportunity is, is that we have the resources to submit to regulatory clarity, investing resources into opening offices, hiring talented people, focusing on the compliance, making sure that regulators are happy with what we're doing and who we're doing it with. And then a lot of that also comes with staffing requirements. You have to make sure that you're addressing the institutional nuances of each individual jurisdiction you're in, making sure that you're in compliance with all of the accounting rules and requirements, which is, I mean, it's not a small task. And for us, we're very excited to have the opportunity to be in these markets, to service our customers. And our promise to them is that, look, we will take you into the markets you want to be in and we will keep you there because we're going to invest behind it and make sure that we're building a strong foundation in those markets.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, it's a very exciting story to watch, I can tell you that much. Do you think we'll have you back here at some point ringing the bell?
Farooq Malik
>> Well, hopefully if things go the way that we want, that's our plan.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, we certainly hope so too. Farooq, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
Farooq Malik
>> Thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series where we talk to those who are redefining the next phase of traditional finance. Thanks so much for watching.
Gemma Allen