What is the point of this technology? | Arnold Lee, CEO of Sphere Labs

In 2022, Terra Luna collapsed and billions left the crypto ecosystem overnight. For most builders, it was the end. For Arnold Lee, it was a forcing function: if this technology has a point, what is it? His answer was Sphere Labs, a B2B cross-border payments platform that uses stablecoins as internal settlement infrastructure while keeping the experience invisible to end users. Today Sphere processes billions in annual volume across 60 people, serving fintechs and trade finance companies in markets where traditional correspondent banking fails. In this conversation with Jemma Green, Arnold covers: Finding Bitcoin in middle school, farming online surveys for gift cards, and why he thought it was a loyalty points system tied to a website How Sphere differs from Stripe, Circle, and every other stablecoin payments company, and why the distinction matters for the $40 trillion B2B cross-border market Why stablecoins are not a crypto product, they are a payments product that happens to use crypto rails The systemic risk nobody is modeling: dollar-denominated stablecoins expanding globally as a vampire attack on local monetary sovereignty Why AI agents exploiting each other in adversarial onchain environments is not a hypothetical, it is an engineering problem happening now What the GENIUS Act actually changes versus what the industry thinks it changes The "slowly then all at once" dynamic in frontier payments markets that will be obvious in twelve months and is invisible today Arnold Lee is a CEO of Sphere Labs, a fintech infrastructure company building stablecoin‑powered global payments rails for institutions and fintechs. Unblock'd is hosted by Dr. Jemma Green, co-founder and CEO of Powerledger.For more information, visit: https://www.powerledger.io/Or connect the host on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/