$100M → $1 Stablecoins with Brale
Author
Gabriella Pellagatti
Publishing date
A block by block conversation with Ben Milne
In Block by Block, Denelle Dixon talks with Brale CEO Ben Milne about why stablecoin issuance was expensive, exclusive, and slow to scale - and why that’s no longer the case, thanks to Brale.
Ben lives in Des Moines, Iowa, and jokes that explaining his work at dinner parties rarely goes well. His shorthand for Brale is simple: “It’s like a big money computer.” In practice, Brale lets companies issue and operate regulated, fiat-backed stablecoins without building the banking, compliance, or blockchain stack themselves.
Before founding Brale, Ben spent more than a decade building large-scale USD transfer infrastructure at Dwolla. That experience shaped how he thinks about payments - both how far the system has come and where its limits remain.
This conversation traces how those limits pushed Milne toward stablecoins, why he believed existing regulation already supported them, and how Brale’s approach to licensing and infrastructure changes who can issue and use digital dollars.
Trust is the constraint
Dixon opens the conversation by reframing what matters most right now. “The defining question for institutional adoption of onchain assets,” she says, “it isn’t speed, and it’s not cost. It really is trust.” Institutions want to know who is issuing these assets, how they are governed, and what happens when something goes wrong. Expectations from regulators, banks, and enterprises are higher than they were a few years ago - and, as Dixon notes, that pressure is a good thing.
Ben agrees. Trust, he argues, is earned by operating inside clear rules, not by trying to outrun them.
Building inside the rules
Ben has been consistent about his approach from the start. “I thought it was best to be regulated,” he says. “I thought it was best to build the business inside of the existing regulatory structure and not try to convince a new one.” In his view, the framework for issuing stablecoins already existed under money transmitter laws. The problem was that it was expensive, fragmented, and poorly understood.
Brale spent its first two and a half years doing the unglamorous work: securing licenses and building its own signing, issuance, and custody infrastructure in-house. Only after that foundation was in place did the company begin selling to customers. For Ben, that sequence was how credibility was earned.
From issuer to infrastructure
One decision reshaped the business more than any other. Brale began supporting stablecoins it did not issue, including assets from Paxos and Circle. Internally, the move raised obvious questions. Why support competitors?
Ben’s response: “We kind of took a flyer and just did it because a customer asked,” Ben says. “And it totally changed the business.” Usage “absolutely exploded.” Supporting multiple issuers unlocked flows across chains, assets, bank accounts, and virtual accounts. What started as an accommodation clarified that Brale’s role is not just an issuer, but shared infrastructure for moving digital dollars.
Lowering the barrier
That shift made the economics hard to ignore. “When we got started, it was like a hundred million bucks was the ticket to go launch a stablecoin,” Ben says, adding that companies needed “a line of sight to a billion dollars” to be taken seriously. That model worked for PayPal or Stripe. For nearly everyone else, it meant being locked out.
Brale set out to absorb that fixed cost once. “We spent that first two and a half years building all that tech to get it down to a dollar in a minute,” Ben says. “It’s literally like a million times better than the next best last thing.” The result is not just lower cost, but a different starting point. Developers no longer need insider access or enterprise contracts to begin.
This is where Dixon’s idea of the “permissionless premium” comes to life. Well-designed open infrastructure can offer institutions capabilities they cannot get from closed systems.
What comes next
Ben sees stablecoin adoption unfolding over long horizons. Payments come first, followed by embedded finance, with full institutional adoption playing out over decades. Trillions of dollars may eventually move onto protocols.
What remains unknowable is what happens when stablecoins expand the bandwidth of money itself, particularly in combination with AI and autonomous agents. “It’s possible that stablecoins and protocols create the scenario where this is like edge compute for money,” Ben says. “I think there’s something like that out there. I just don’t know what it is yet. I’m excited to find out.”