Reeve Collins

Everyone gets their own bank.

The infrastructure becomes universal. The value becomes personal.

Reeve Collins | Co-founder and first CEO of Tether, 2014

  • The Wall Street Journal
  • Bloomberg
  • CNBC
  • Forbes
  • CoinDesk
  • Cointelegraph

Past, Present, Inevitable Future

PAST

For most of financial history, the people who moved money were not the people who made money from moving it. Banks captured settlement float. Custodians captured opacity fees. Intermediaries at every layer extracted value from every transaction that passed through them. Not because the service required it. Because they owned the infrastructure. Access was rationed by geography, documentation, and minimum balance. The institutions that controlled the rails decided who could use them and on what terms.

PRESENT

In 2014, the first dollar-backed token put the ledger on a public network. The model worked. Stablecoins became infrastructure. The institutions that had dismissed them started building on them. But the first generation solved only half the problem. In the dominant model, money moved on open rails and the yield on hundreds of billions in reserves stayed with the issuer. A new mechanism, the same extraction logic. The pieces for something different now exist. They are not yet connected.

FUTURE

A connected stack changes the answer to the design question. Programmable rules embedded in the asset mean the rules enforce themselves, with no intermediary to trust. Yield separates from the principal and flows to the holder rather than the house. Banking settles in seconds because the float that made delay profitable no longer exists. Collateral works while it sits instead of sitting while it works. An interface that reaches anyone with a phone.

Finance is becoming software. The rules move into the asset. The value moves to the holder.

Reeve Collins

Five Layers. One Architecture.

Separate companies, each built for one layer.

  1. 05

    Experience

    Wallets, apps, agents

    The wallet replaces the branch. Banking stops being a place you are admitted to and becomes a function you carry with you.

  2. 04

    Banking

    WeFi

    Accounts, payments, custody and yield, on open rails, without the float and the gatekeeping.

  3. 03

    Money

    Tether, STBL

    Reserve-backed, programmable money. The model that began with Tether, rebuilt so the yield reaches the holder.

  4. 02

    Collateral

    AUM

    Real-world assets as working collateral. Gold first: no cash flows to model, no credit to assess, no issuer to default.

  5. 01

    Rules

    Dual, SmartMedia

    Identity, ownership, permissions and economics embedded in the asset. The rules used to live in institutions. Now they live in the assets.

Don’t be your own bank. Get your own bank.

Built

  1. 2014

    Tether

    Co-founder and first CEO. The first fiat-backed stablecoin.

  2. 2017

    BLOCKv

    Co-founder. Programmable digital objects on a blockchain, before the word NFT existed.

  3. 2018

    SmartMedia Technologies

    Founder. Programmable tokens in more than 7 million wallets for Visa, PepsiCo, Samsung, FIFA and the Olympics.

  4. 2024

    WeFi

    Co-founder and chairman. On-chain banking. Working with Visa since April 2026.

  5. 2025

    STBL

    Co-founder and chairman. Yield-bearing stablecoins.

Watch

  • Stablecoins and the future of finance.

    Smart Humans with Slava Rubin, 2026.

  • Where the trillions go next.

    On The Margin, 2026.