1Money CEO Brian Shroder on building L1 for stablecoins with no native token — and flat gas fees

1Money will soon launch the crypto industry's first Layer 1 network purpose-built for stablecoins, built to support rapid, cheap transactions without a native token or smart contract support, the startup's CEO and co-founder Brian Shroder told The Block in an interview.

1Money's goal is to create the fastest, cheapest and most compliant network for stablecoins, engineered to drive adoption by businesses who have resisted crypto adoption in the past, facing issues like murky legal compliance, slow transaction speeds, and the need to deal in speculative assets like native blockchain tokens.

"The reason that we can be the cheapest is because we don't have our own token," Shroder said. "So we don't have to divert gas fees to prop up the price of a speculative asset...now all of a sudden we're able to actually have gas fees that are flat rates."

The network's patent-pending Byzantine Consistent Broadcast system allows for near-instant finality. The system's architecture is similar to Meta's defunct Diem stablecoin project .

"We are actually not a blockchain…we are a distributed ledger technology that uses broadcasting to update our ledgers," Shroder said. "We're able to process all transactions as they occur with equal priority…we can now settle all transactions in under one second."

The startup recently announced a funding round of more than $20 million and unveiled its leadership team, which consists of co-founders Shroder, who is the former CEO of Binance.US, and his brother Matt Shroder, a former SVP of global operations at Binance with additional experience at Uber. The startup recently appointed former OKX deputy general counsel Chris Lalan as chief legal officer, former Binance deputy CCO Kristen Hecht as CCO, and former Ripple CISO Brett Enclade as CISO.

Last year, fintech company Stripe acquired stablecoin startup Bridge for $1.1 billion, the crypto industry's largest acquisition to date. The company provides software tools to help companies accept stablecoins as payments.

"The truth is that we would have the same capabilities as Bridge, but we own the network, which I think is a lot more attractive," Shroder said when asked about the rival company. "Our long-term goal, though, is the growth of the network, and so that's what we're focused in on."

Currently, Ethereum and Tron lead all other blockchain networks in stablecoin supply, boasting a combined $182.5 billion worth of stablecoins, according to The Block's data. Tether's USDT, the world's leading stablecoin, has a supply of about $143 billion across all networks.

Shroder said 1Money's approach addresses several key complaints from businesses considering stablecoin adoption, such as the possibility for open blockchain networks to enable money laundering, the irregular speed and cost of transactions, and the need to hold volatile assets on a company's balance sheet.

"Having L1s or L2s that settle anywhere from a couple seconds to maybe 30 minutes, depending on the network traffic, that doesn't work for Starbucks, right?" Shroder said. "They're not going to hold your cup of coffee until the transaction settles."

As for the lack of smart contract support, which would preclude DeFi projects operating on the network and offering yield on stablecoin holdings, Shroder argued the network's reliability and ease of use will help draw users.

"Currently, Tron and Solana are leading in terms of stablecoin payments because they are the fastest and the cheapest in the category," Shroder said. "We feel that naturally, if we put out a product that's faster and cheaper than all of them, there will be a natural gravitation to use us."

1Money plans to launch its network in the second quarter of 2025, with scaling improvements planned for the third quarter.