Thomas Cowan worked on the CBDC team at the Boston Fed, built infrastructure at Ripple and Paxos that powers PayPal's stablecoin, and now leads tokenization at Galaxy. Much of Galaxy's tokenization work, including the stock experiment discussed in the podcast, runs on Solana.
On Bits to Bricks, he talked about the speed that tokenization is moving and the role of stablecoins in global dollar dominance.
The dollar won by accident, and stablecoins are accelerating it
Stablecoins have roughly $300 billion in circulation, and around 99% of that is denominated in US dollars. Not because Washington planned it, but largely because the crypto economy started in the US, people wanted dollar-denominated trading pairs, and network effects took care of the rest.
"In many ways, $300 billion is a big number. In other ways, if you look at FX or you look at actual flows, it's still a drop in the bucket," Cowan said. The three main use cases today are cross-border payments, dollar access in emerging markets, and trading pairs for digital assets.
But Cowan sees this shifting. As onchain finance connects more deeply with traditional markets, other currencies will show up. Galaxy has already launched a euro-denominated stablecoin called AllUnity with Flow Traders and DWS, betting that the European market will eventually take off.
The interesting part is what happens when it does. Onchain currency access means central banks are suddenly competing for users. "If the dollar is more widely available than the yen or the euro, those other currencies then have to compete from a central bank perspective to make sure that their product is at least as competitive," Cowan said. Chhangani made a similar point in her episode: central bank governors now rank stablecoins as a bigger concern than tariff policy.
The central banker's playbook
During the episode, Amira Valliani asked Cowan to roleplay as a central bank governor watching dollar stablecoins spread. His answer was practical.
- Step 1: Work with regulators to create an environment where stablecoins of your local currency are the preferred way to transact onchain.
- Step 2: Build the on and off ramps so they're frictionless.
- Step 3: Get local tech companies and financial firms building in your currency.
"Once you have that flywheel going of the regulation, the tech, and the financial support, that is how you're able to build a local jurisdiction with a local stablecoin" – Thomas Cowan
That's the carrot side. Cowan was clear that sticks come too. "The history of monetary policy shows that the stick is very often used and effectively used, frankly." Capital controls and enforcement against unlicensed issuers are the same tools central banks already use, now pointed at onchain flows.
Countries that had shelved digital currency projects are picking them back up, wanting to offer citizens a public alternative before dollar stablecoins become the default.
Why retail CBDCs probably won't be the answer
Cowan spent time on Project Hamilton at the Boston Fed, researching what a US retail CBDC would actually require. The system demonstrated 1.7 million transactions per second in testing just to meet projected peak US payment volumes. When Project Hamilton ran, most public chains couldn't come close to that kind of throughput.
Solana has narrowed the gap in the years since.
Firedancer, the independent validator client from Jump Crypto, demonstrated 1 million TPS in a controlled multi-node test at Breakpoint 2024. Alpenglow, the consensus upgrade approved by more than 98% of stakers, is designed to cut finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds. The timeline from Congressional funding to a deployable retail CBDC would still be at least seven to ten years, given the testing and resilience standards the Fed rightly demands.
"In that decade, the private sector will come in and solve a lot of the problems of instant settlement and clear transparency and inefficiencies that stablecoins can really enable," Cowan said. "By the end of that decade, would you really need a retail CBDC? Unclear." A lot of that private-sector work is already happening on Solana, where stablecoin flows for remittances and cross-border payments settle in under a second for well under a cent. Those economics are what make overseas dollar access actually viable.
Tokenized stocks and the next layer of American dominance
The conversation shifted when Cowan described Galaxy tokenizing its own stock on Solana. This wasn't the typical wrapped-token approach, where an SPV holds shares and issues derivative tokens against them. Galaxy worked with SuperState as a sub-transfer agent, becoming the first SEC-registered public equity issued directly on a public chain. The Solana chain is the legal source of truth for ownership. Cowan holds Galaxy Class A common stock in his Phantom wallet, a Solana-native wallet on his phone. Same legal standing as anything in a Schwab account.
A share that needs to settle in seconds instead of days, hold up under institutional-grade volume, and be usable as collateral in DeFi minutes after it's issued requires more than a willing issuer. It needs a chain that can actually handle it. Sub-second finality and low fees are part of that. So is the stack around the chain: SuperState handling the transfer agent layer, Phantom providing self-custody, and regulated issuers building compliant products on top.
What does it actually change? For one, counterparty risk. A typical stock purchase passes through six to ten intermediaries before it settles. A token eliminates that chain. Regulators and lenders also gain real-time visibility into movement onchain, which is a step change from reconciling across multiple custodians. And then there's collateral. Instead of meeting a broker's minimum to post shares, you can deposit into a permissioned DeFi pool and borrow against your holdings directly.
Then Cowan connected this back to the dollar dominance theme. "Why do people choose to IPO in New York?" he asked. Because the US has the best financial infrastructure, the most liquidity, the highest regulatory standards. The same logic applies onchain. Issuers and traders choose where liquidity is deepest, execution is cheapest, and the infrastructure is trusted. The issuers choosing Solana for this kind of work today, Galaxy and SuperState among them, are the ones shaping where onchain listings land next.
Stablecoins extend the dollar's reach to individuals who want access to a stable currency. Tokenized capital markets do something different: they extend American financial infrastructure to institutions worldwide.
This article draws from Amira Valliani's conversation with Thomas Cowan, Head of Tokenization at Galaxy. For the full discussion, listen to the complete episode of Bits to Bricks.
