SCRYPT
Norman Wooding
May 2026
Norman Wooding, founder and CEO of SCRYPT, sits down with Matthew Challis to discuss the operational realities of stablecoin adoption, non-negotiables for risk committees, and why programmable money is the missing layer between AI intelligence and institutional treasury execution
Image: SCRYPT
Stablecoins, while initially framed as a payments tool, have quickly transitioned to core settlement infrastructure. What do you think has driven this shift?
The volume made the argument for us. US$33 trillion processed in 2025; that’s not a payments experiment, that’s infrastructure. What drove it is simple: institutions need T+0 settlement, they need it across borders, and they need it outside of banking hours. Traditional rails can’t do that. Stablecoins can.
Once treasury teams saw they could settle a US$4 million cross-border flow in minutes instead of days, the conversation shifted from “should we use stablecoins” to “how fast can we integrate them”.
While adoption has risen substantially over the last one to two years, what needs to happen before stablecoins can be adopted more broadly, and with more confidence in institutional settlement workflows?
Confidence follows regulation. The jurisdictions with clear frameworks — Switzerland, the EU under Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation — are already seeing real institutional volume move. When the rules are defined, institutions commit.
The other piece is operational simplicity. Most firms exploring digital assets quickly discover the
infrastructure is fragmented, with different providers for trading, custody, settlement, and compliance.
Until that experience feels as operationally clean as what they’re used to in traditional markets, adoption will remain selective rather than broad.
What operational challenges are systemically underestimated by institutional clients when entering digital assets for the first time, and how do they initially come across those challenges?
The biggest underestimate is what happens after the decision to enter. Firms plan for the trade; they don’t plan for everything around it.
Settlement is the first surprise. A cross-border stablecoin flow that should take minutes ends up taking days because the fiat off-ramp doesn’t operate on weekends, or the banking partner needs manual approval for crypto-related transfers.
Reconciliation is the second. When you’re working across multiple providers for trading, custody, and settlement, matching records across systems becomes a daily operational burden that most teams aren’t staffed for.
Compliance is the third. Ongoing transaction monitoring, Travel Rule obligations, and Know Your Transaction (KYT) integration — these aren’t one-time setups; they’re continuous operational commitments that scale with volume.
And then there’s the human side: finding people who understand both traditional finance operations and digital asset infrastructure is genuinely difficult.
Most institutions end up learning that entering digital assets isn’t a technology decision. It’s an operational transformation.
What are the minimum requirements for an institutional platform, regarding to governance, controls, regulatory standing, and day-to-day operations, before regulators and risk committees can be comfortable?
A recognised regulatory licence is the starting point; risk committees won’t engage without it.
Beyond that: Multi-Party Computation (MPC)-based segregated custody, SOC 2 Type II or equivalent certification, real-time transaction monitoring with KYT, and 24/7 operational coverage.
Governance-wise, institutions expect a clear separation of duties, documented incident response procedures, and auditable trails for every asset movement.
The bar most platforms underestimate is operational continuity. Digital assets trade 24/7, which means your support, your compliance, and your settlement infrastructure must too.
If you only operate during business hours, you’re not ready for institutional capital.
From your standpoint, what are the most important non-negotiable risk controls that must be in place before you consider routing client assets into a DeFi-linked strategy?
Segregated custody is non-negotiable — client assets must be isolated at every point in the chain. Beyond that: quantitative position sizing, continuous rebalancing, and 24/7 onchain monitoring.
We work with Gauntlet specifically because they bring institutional-grade risk management to DeFi strategies; real-time stress testing, not after-the-fact reporting.
The rule is straightforward: if you can’t monitor the vault continuously and pull assets within minutes, you shouldn’t have client capital in it.
Where should institutions draw the line when trading off a pure DeFi opportunity against adding too many safeguards, to the point that the yield disappears?
Transparency is the line. If you can’t explain where the yield comes from in one sentence, it’s not a strategy. It’s a liability.
We focus on risk-optimised returns from a curated set of vaults where the source of yield is verifiable, and the risk parameters are enforced programmatically. Institutional clients don’t need the highest number. They need a number they can explain to their compliance team, their board, and their auditors.
That’s a fundamentally different product from what most of DeFi offers.
What sort of authorisation models and audit trails would be required by institutions before they can be comfortable letting an AI agent manage even smaller parts of treasury or collateral operations onchain?
The infrastructure has to enforce the rules, not the human. Programmable stablecoin rails allow you to hard-code limits directly into the settlement layer: transaction caps, multi-sig approval thresholds, and jurisdiction restrictions. The audit trail has to be native to the chain, not a report generated after the fact.
At SCRYPT, we’ve already integrated AI deeply into our operations: content production, internal workflows, and operational monitoring. The next step for the industry is AI managing treasury flows within strictly defined parameters. But the prerequisite is settlement infrastructure that can execute at machine speed with built-in compliance.
That’s where stablecoins become essential — they’re the only programmable money that AI agents can actually use.
Are institutions already experimenting with AI-driven payment flows, waiting on regulatory feedback? Or are they waiting for regulators before proceeding with initiatives?
Yes, they’re experimenting, but they’re hitting the same wall. AI agents can optimise a treasury decision in milliseconds, but the payment instruction still lands in a correspondent bank queue that takes days.
The intelligence layer has moved faster than the settlement layer.
What institutions need is programmable money that settles instantly and executes logic natively. That’s stablecoins.
The firms that are furthest ahead are the ones that have already solved for custody and settlement; once you have that infrastructure, layering AI on top is an engineering problem, not a regulatory one.
The ones still waiting for regulators to tell them it’s safe are going to find themselves years behind.
Next interview →
Davies
Tina Wilkinson
