KAST’s founder wants to build the bank account 20-year-olds never have to leave

This is an article based on a Talking Tokens podcast interview. To get the full Talking Tokens episode, subscribe to our Newsletter or check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.
For years, a lot of the stablecoin pitch was simply convincing people that stablecoins work. According to Raagulan “Raags� Pathy (@raagulanpathy), founder and CEO of KAST (@KASTxyz), “that period is finished or finishing.�
Late last month, KAST rebranded around the tagline Money by KAST, and Pathy announced it on X with a blunt line: “Stablecoins are dead. Money is back.�
KAST, which built a global money app with dollar accounts, cards and cross-border payments that run on stablecoins, launched in July 2024 and raised an $80 million Series A in March. At the time, the company claimed more than one million users and nearly $5 billion in annualized transaction volume.
Before KAST, Pathy led Circle’s business in APAC, where much of his team’s work was getting traders to use USDC as a major trading pair in a market dominated by Tether’s USDT. He left once he saw stablecoins “going from being used for trading� to becoming a base layer that fintechs and neobanks could build on, he said on @StrataMedia_’s @_TalkingTokens podcast, recorded at Korea Blockchain Week late last month.
“The customer is what I call 1 to 5% of every country. People who are in crypto, they’re remote workers, they are solopreneurs, or they have small businesses,� Pathy said. He expects that group of people who live and work across borders to keep growing over the next decade, but “no one’s paying attention to it because it seems like just such a small cohort of people.�
Those customers usually already have a bank, he said, but “they have to pull together 3 to 5 products to make money move or do all the things they need to.� So KAST is trying to put their dollar accounts, cards, payments and savings in one place, and it removed stablecoins from its main marketing because “people just want to know that it works.�
Pathy admits he has a “controversial opinion� at conferences, which is that the stablecoin talk is getting “kind of boring� now. “This is what crypto people do. We just talk about the infrastructure over and over again. I’d much rather talk about the problems that consumers have,� he said, which, candidly, I agreed with, given how similar some of the stablecoin-centric episodes we’ve recorded have been.
“If you really want to go to the mass market, that’s where you’ve got to spend your time. You’ve got to spend your time solving these problems,� Pathy said.
One result of that is an upcoming product called KAST Solo, a stripped-down version of KAST Business for freelancers and solo business owners that would help with company formation and tax filing. He shared it exclusively with me on the show, after his team noticed people were putting hotel and travel costs for their small businesses on personal KAST cards.
Simplicity is one of KAST’s core principles, but Pathy admits the company hasn’t always lived up to it. As KAST added more banking partners this year, some customers couldn’t easily see where their deposits were. “The customer, I’ve told my team, doesn’t care� about the compliance teams and banking partnerships behind the app, he said, so KAST spent much of the year making those systems feel uniform to users.
Going forward, Pathy is focused on younger customers. He shared how he opened his first bank account in Australia when he was about 8 or 10 years old, and more than 30 years later, it’s still his primary bank. Similarly, I’m still using the bank account my parents set up for me when I went off to college.
Once people hit their mid-30s, he said, it’s very hard to get them to switch, so KAST wants to win them at 20 and grow with them through credit cards, loans, mortgages and moves between countries. “It’s been the one thing that’s stable. They haven’t had to go and change all the time. That’s my ambition,� he said.