What Is This Episode About?
In “Crypto Is Changing Banking” on the Treehouse Talks Podcast, Coinbax Founder & CEO Peter Glyman sits down with host Eric Isham for a long-form conversation about what happens when banks and credit unions can no longer afford to treat digital assets as someone else’s business.
Peter opens with the thesis the rest of the episode unpacks:
I really believe that blockchain architecture, stablecoins, digital assets, tokenization of assets is the future technology stack for financial services, period. We are going to see a leveling up of our architecture in the industry as a whole over the next 10 years, and it’s going to be fast and amazing.
How Did Peter Get Into Fintech?
Not by the usual route. He grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, where his father spotted swordfish from the air for the harpoon boats below, and spent a summer out of high school as first mate on a harpoon tuna boat — paid on a percentage of the catch, which was flown overnight to the auction in Japan so you found out the next day what your fish was worth.
A real estate course in community college made him, at 19, the youngest licensed realtor in Connecticut. Inside sales came next, then a startup that ran out of funding, then GainsKeeper — his first fintech job, doing the unglamorous tax lot accounting work that active trading platforms and hedge funds depended on. It is also where he met Sean Ward, his future co-founder.
What Did Twelve Years of Building Geezeo Teach Him?
The original idea was to help people manage debt with the same discipline a financial advisor applies to a portfolio. Building it revealed the catch: to advise on debt you need income, cash flow, and bills — at which point you have built a personal financial management product.
The pivot that defined the company came from the market. Banks and credit unions were watching money leave for third-party PFM tools, and they asked whether Geezeo would white-label its product for them. Geezeo rebuilt as a multi-tenant product embedded inside digital banking rather than beside it, and grew through channel partnerships rather than a direct sales army — even though nobody on the founding team had ever sold into a financial institution before.
In the episode Peter is candid about the parts founders usually skip: the near-acquisition that collapsed when the market turned, the hardest stretch of the grind, knowing when it was time to sell, and the 2019 exit. His own summary of the journey: a twelve-year overnight success.
Why Are Banks Losing Business to Crypto Platforms?
This is the part of the conversation with the sharpest institutional edge, and it is the same dynamic that created Geezeo’s opening fifteen years earlier.
When an account holder wants to buy or hold digital assets, they leave. Balances move out of the institution and onto an exchange or a crypto platform, taking the relationship data and the next product sale with them. Meanwhile fintechs keep expanding into services that used to belong exclusively to chartered institutions.
Eric and Peter get into what will actually drive stablecoin adoption, the real risks of moving money onchain, where stablecoins sit relative to Venmo and Cash App, and the lending and digital-asset opportunities that open up once an institution can safely hold and move tokenized value. Peter’s read: regulated institutions hold a genuine structural advantage — trust, compliance capability, existing relationships — but only if they move while it still holds.
Why Does This Matter for Financial Institutions?
Roughly $300 billion in stablecoins is already circulating, and account holders are transacting in it whether or not their institution participates. The GENIUS Act gave U.S. institutions a federal framework to operate inside, which retires “we’re waiting on regulatory clarity” as an answer.
The open question is no longer whether digital assets belong in the product mix. It is whether the institution intermediates that activity or watches the deposits go somewhere that will.
The Coinbax Perspective
Peter’s career is the reason Coinbax is built the way it is. Twelve years selling into banks and credit unions taught him that the winning position is inside the institution’s existing experience, not beside it — and that institutions adopt technology when it fits the systems, controls, and examinations they already live with, not when it is elegant.
That is why Coinbax ships controls rather than an asset. Programmable escrow, built-in reversibility, and real-time compliance are what turn stablecoin settlement into something a bank or credit union can actually deploy. Coinbax Deposits is the most direct expression of that thesis: when an account holder asks to deposit stablecoins, the institution can say yes, convert to dollars on its own balance sheet, and keep the relationship instead of losing it to an exchange.
Watch the full conversation on Treehouse Talks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Treehouse Talks Podcast?
Treehouse Talks is a podcast hosted by Eric Isham featuring conversations with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders building in fintech and adjacent industries.
Why do banks lose wallet share when customers buy digital assets?
Account holders move funds out of the institution to an exchange or crypto platform in order to buy and hold digital assets. Those balances, and the relationship activity attached to them, leave the institution’s books and generally do not come back.
What advantage do regulated institutions have in stablecoins?
Banks and credit unions already hold the trust, compliance capability, and customer relationships that crypto-native platforms have spent years trying to build. The episode frames that advantage as real but time-limited, which makes speed of adoption the deciding variable.
What is Peter Glyman’s biggest lesson for founders?
Get the financial and operational structure of the company right from the very beginning. Fixing it later, under pressure and usually mid-raise, costs far more than setting it up correctly on day one.