Join our host Stephen Sargeant with Xen Baynham-Herd, Head of Growth and Marketing at Base, on the Around The Coin podcast to discuss Base’s newest launches. Base Ledgers for enterprise-grade private transactions (shielded from the public but visible to regulators/auditors) and Base MCP, which connects chat interfaces like ChatGPT/Claude to a wallet and Base apps so agents can execute DeFi actions with user approval. Xen shares his path from TradFi and five years at Blockchain.com to working with Balaji Srinivasan on The Network State, and explains how Base is growing across trading, lending, payments (including major USDC transfer volume and local-currency stablecoins), and agents. They cover institutional adoption, X402 as an internet payments protocol enabling agentic commerce, Agentic market, and Xen’s approach to global expansion and building founder-driven communities. We are also available via: Around The Coin — Official Website Buzzsprout Apple Podcast Spotify Player FM Quora Medium X Facebook LinkedIn Tiktok Soundcloud

How AI Agents Use Stablecoins - Xen Baynham-Herd | ATC #617

Around The Coin

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Around The Coin

## Participants

- **Stephen Sargeant** (Around The Coin)
- **Xen Baynham-Herd** (Base)

## Transcript

Let's get Zen at the Around The Coin podcast. Or we could just talk to Zen, the Head of Growth and Marketing at Base. Coinbase is Ethereum layer 2 that is building all the best and most progressive apps when it comes to Identic Finance, Stablecoins and everything in between. We talked to Zen about the new products that are just being released by Base, including Base Ledgers and Base MCP. We talked about his previous

role working with biology at the network state and we go on to see what X402 and the rest of the stablecoin standard ecosystem is going to mean for agentic payments and more importantly in gentic finance. This is going to be a fun episode talking to Zen, he understands his space better than anybody else when it comes to Base and here you have to listen to this episode. This is the Around The Coin

Podcast live with Stephen Sargeant. We have Zen, the Head of Growth and Marketing at Base. Zen, maybe just give us a quick background of how you got to Base and then we're going to talk a little bit about some of the projects that you worked on in crypto as you were very early on 2017 when you started working at the staple Blockchain.com that we want to get into as well. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, really great to be here. I'm curious, you started, you know, 2017, the market's hot, everyone's getting into crypto,

though, but you spent five years at blockchain.com which means that you were there in 2018 which is when I entered the space and you know the momentum kind of died out of the bottom, you know, out of the bottom of Bitcoin and blockchain alike. Can you tell us a little bit, you know, about your time at blockchain.com and what your experience was and you know how it evolved from 2017 to 2022 which is when you

worked there. Yeah, sure. So I actually got into crypto earlier than that around 2015, 2016 whilst I was still a trader at an investment bank and I was leading a project which was designed to create a stable coin using central bank deposits and that project really got me into crypto because it showed me

that money could become digital and if it did the benefits we get from stable coins and from tokenization. And so I very much like, I guess, came to crypto from an institutional TradFi beginning and I got into crypto actually through meeting some people, the likes of like

Balaji Srinivasan who went on to found the network state, Peter Smith, the CEO of blockchain.com. I got to know these people and these people pulled me into crypto from my investment bank position and yes, I joined blockchain.com in early 2017 and the company at the time was a leading Bitcoin wallet. And what I worked on and what I felt quite proud of doing with the company was helping to grow the

company over five years to become a full service platform basically for crypto, buildin...

How AI Agents Use Stablecoins - Xen Baynham-Herd | ATC #617

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

How AI Agents Use Stablecoins - Xen Baynham-Herd | ATC #617

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.