Prabhakar Reddy Discusses Cross Border FX With Pantera’s Mason Nystrom

Episode description

On this podcast, our founder Prabhakar sits down with Mason Nystrom of Pantera to talk about the many reasons cross-border FX is still broken, and how we are building OpenFX to solve problems that have been baked into the industry for decades.

Traditional cross-border FX is built on incentives that militate against fast settlement, particularly in corridors outside of the G7. By some estimates, there are $4 trillion trapped in transit at any given movement, either being held to support pre-funding or unavailable as a result of SWIFT delays.

He discusses the cost of all of these delays, and how automation is the only scalable solution.

He Talks About

• How opaque spreads, pre-funding requirements and bad incentives have created a world where cross-border FX is slower and more expensive than it should be.

• How eliminating the need for pre-funding could unlock enormous amounts of economic dynamism across the world.

• How automation allows OpenFX to scale volume in ways that other providers simply cannot.

• How our platform changes the markets we interact with, compressing spreads by 90 to 95%.

• Why we believe that agentic payments are closer than many might believe they are.

Chapters

00:00   Intro

00:49   Why cross-border FX is still broken in 2026

03:35   How OpenFX works

07:14   $4 trillion stuck in transit

07:44   Zero to $40B TPV in 18 months

09:07   The three factors behind OpenFX's explosion

12:08   Payments is going through a complete upheaval

14:55   AI agents

16:42   OpenFX is building the AWS of money

17:10   Do fintech moats still exist?

18:40   Moving $100B in crypto

19:40   Why crypto companies die without compliance

20:14   Culture is just the founder's personality scaled

23:22   Agentic payments

24:35   Where a payments insider would bet today

25:47   Why there's no universal founder advice