How Kast Uses Stablecoins To Make A Global Bank Possible, And Why This Hasn’t Worked Before

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Raagulan Pathy, founder of KAST and the “stablecoin guy”, to discuss what happens when a $100M company goes to zero, what eight years of debt repayment does to a founder’s mindset, and why he now believes stablecoins can power a global bank serving 150+ countries, and possibly a billion people.

Raags is direct about the scale of what he’s trying to build. He says, on record, that KAST is a “trillion dollar plus” outcome in his mind, “100 billion if we miss and 10 billion if we miss really badly.” 

The Math Most Founders Don’t Understand

One of the most useful ideas in this episode is Raags’ concept of compounding as a founder. He explains it simply: most people hear “15% growth vs 20% growth” and assume it’s “just 5% more.” But once you compound that monthly, over a year or two, the gap becomes evident. If you do that across ten areas of execution, from fundraising, hiring, marketing, to the speed of shipping, you aren’t just a slightly better company. You become the one that wins, while others become second best.

He also uses compounding as a managerial tool. With 170 employees, he’s trying to make the compounding mindset travel through the organisation. His tactic is unusually old-school: writing directly to people, at all levels, to reduce “translation in between.” 

The Immigrant Lens: Wealth Can Disappear, Opportunity Can’t

Raags’ worldview is largely due to being born in Sri Lanka, moving to Australia at age five, and watching his family go from wealthy to “having nothing.”

His father, he says, was successful back home, but in Australia ended up living a “very basic” life as a shopkeeper. Raags worked in the shop from before age ten. That immigrant experience shapes his view of money and fairness: even if his family wasn’t rich in Australia, they were “rich in opportunity.”

That distinction matters later, because KAST’s pitch isn’t only about stablecoins. It’s about access. It’s about building the kind of financial layer that makes opportunity less dependent on where you were born.

The First Company: When $100m Becomes Zero

The emotional centre of the episode is Raags’ first company: a cloud software business in Australia that grew fast and was worth “nearly $100 million.” Then it went to zero. But the hardest part wasn’t the business dying. It was the personal debt he acquired. 

He explains that early cloud infrastructure required capital, and the only way to get it was by signing personally. When the business collapsed, the debt followed him. For most founders, failure is a clean reset. For Raags, he stayed in the negative for years after the business had ended. “It basically took out nearly all the money I made in my 20s. Took me to not zero but negative, and it wiped out probably 8 to 10 years of my life.”

He could have declared bankruptcy, but chose not to, partly because Australia’s bankruptcy laws were punitive at the time. Instead, he took corporate roles (Amazon, Facebook) and paid the debt down. That period of working while repaying what his startup left behind became the foundation for KAST’s financial discipline later.

“Eating Humble Pie”

Raags names a psychological step that most founders don’t like talking about: “eating humble pie.” After believing you’re worth tens of millions, taking a corporate job for “$150k–$160k base” can feel like a collapse of identity. He describes it plainly: “You’re worth what you’re worth.” And he admits he struggled with it mentally for a while.

The lesson isn’t “ego is bad.” The lesson is that ego needs to become functional.

He lays out the paradox: you need a huge ego to start something and believe you can be “the one out of ten” that wins. But if you keep that ego connected to status, pride, image, you’ll get crushed, because startups beat you down constantly.

For him, the right balance looks like this: hold the grand vision (“trillion-dollar bank”), but be willing to do the “dirt”, i.e., answer small customers, carry merch in the warehouse, personally respond to complaints etc.,. 

Why Stablecoins Are The Foundation

Raags calls himself “the stablecoin guy” and claims he’s “top 50 in the world” in stablecoin knowledge. But the more interesting part is his thesis: stablecoins are “money on the internet,” and the internet trades in dollars. That’s why, even though USD is a smaller share of global currencies, stablecoins are overwhelmingly USD-denominated.

Then he goes deeper: he argues dollars exist in three layers, onshore US dollars, offshore “eurodollars,” and informal dollars outside banking rails, and he says stablecoins unify them in a single, permissionless layer you can hold on a phone and send anywhere.

But his key insight is what neo-bank founders miss: the stablecoin itself may not be the most profitable layer long-term, especially if interest rates drop again. But the bigger opportunity is building the global bank on top of stablecoins, that’s easily utilized for ordinary life.

Today, most stablecoin experiences are exchanges and wallets, clumsy tools for crypto natives. KAST is trying to turn that into something normal: accounts, savings, cards, on/off ramps, customer service, and global money movement across 150+ countries.

KAST has grown every single month since launching, through good markets and bad. Surprisingly, 70% of users are in developed countries. The need isn’t just emerging markets needing access to USD. It’s also developed-market users who “hate their banks” and want a better experience.

Revenge, Doubt, And A Winner’s Mindset

Near the end, Raags admits something human: he keeps tabs on doubters, people who discounted him, didn’t invest, and said it wasn’t possible. He frames business as sport, and the goal is to win. “We’re not number one,” he says, so it’s back to shipping and delivering the best experience for people. 

The most important takeaway isn’t that KAST will be trillion-dollar. It’s the mindset underneath: compounding, humility for survival, and the willingness to do brutal, unglamorous work to build a product that feels effortless to the user.

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