Stablecoins have become one of the most established use cases in digital assets, giving capital a way to move and settle onchain around the clock. But as the infrastructure for holding and transferring digital dollars matures, a bigger question is emerging: what happens to that capital once it gets there?Frgmnt is building around that question. Its fUSD stablecoin is minted 1:1 against USDC on Base, while users can stake into sfUSD to access yield generated through onchain lending markets including Aave and Morpho. We spoke with CEO Aurélien Roussel about productive stablecoins, institutional adoption, distribution, and why programmable capital could become a core layer of the financial system.1. Before founding Frgmnt, you helped scale Bricks.co to more than 750,000 users and around $500 million in assets. What did that experience teach you?We grew the platform to more than 750,000 users and around $500 million in assets, and I learned that the technology is only one part of the equation. You can build something technically impressive, but if the product is difficult to understand, difficult to access, or doesn't fit into people's existing financial habits, adoption will always be limited.Stablecoins had already solved something fundamental: you could hold and move dollars 24/7, globally, on programmable rails. But I felt that the industry was still very early in answering what happens after the money arrives onchain.For me, Frgmnt was the opportunity to combine what I had learned about financial products and distribution with what was becoming possible through blockchain infrastructure.2. What did you see missing from the market that made you believe Frgmnt needed to exist?What struck me was the gap between the amount of capital sitting in stablecoins and the complexity required to make that capital productive.We now have very sophisticated lending markets and DeFi protocols. But to use them effectively, users often have to understand protocols, liquidity, risk parameters, smart contracts, and constantly changing opportunities.I don't think the average user should have to become a DeFi portfolio manager.We wanted to take the complexity that exists underneath and turn it into infrastructure. The capital can remain in a dollar-denominated asset, while the underlying allocation can be managed across selected onchain strategies.3. What do you want people to understand about how fUSD differs from another DeFi yield product?The first thing I'd tell them is: don't think of fUSD as another product where you have to chase the highest APY.fUSD is the stable dollar-denominated asset, while users who want to participate in the rewards generated by the underlying strategies can voluntarily stake into sfUSD.So instead of asking a user to decide every day whether they should be in Aave, Morpho or another strategy, we want the strategy layer to become infrastructure that operates in the background.4. Why was separating the stable asset from the yield engine so important?fUSD should be simple: one dollar, one unit, highly composable.If I am a wallet, a fintech, or an institution, I may want to offer my users access to fUSD without necessarily exposing them to all of the complexity of the underlying DeFi strategies.And personally, I think this is where financial products are going: different layers of the financial stack should be able to interact without forcing the user to understand every layer underneath.5. Why is the Anchorage Digital partnership an important step for Frgmnt?Anchorage was an important milestone for us because it validated something we strongly believe in: institutional adoption won't happen by asking institutions to become DeFi experts.Institutions already have custody relationships, operational processes, compliance requirements, and risk frameworks. They are not going to throw all of that away just because an interesting DeFi protocol exists.What needs to happen is the opposite: onchain products need to fit into the infrastructure institutions already trust and use.It gives institutions a way to access Frgmnt's infrastructure through an environment designed for institutional digital assets.And I think this is a broader signal for the industry. The next phase of DeFi adoption will not necessarily look like institutions connecting directly to protocols themselves.It will look like DeFi becoming embedded into institutional financial infrastructure.6. Why do you believe distribution could become the main route to wider stablecoin adoption?I strongly believe that distribution is going to become one of the biggest differentiators in stablecoins.We want to go where the capital already is.That's why we think about custodians, wallets, fintechs, exchanges, treasury platforms, and other financial applications as distribution partners.I learned something similar at Bricks.co: distribution is not something you add after building the product. Distribution is part of the product.The winning financial infrastructure may ultimately be the infrastructure that users don't even think about. They simply use their wallet, their custodian, or their financial platform, and the underlying onchain infrastructure does the rest.7. What are the biggest barriers still preventing institutions from moving more capital onchain?I think the conversation has changed quite significantly over the last few years.A few years ago, the question was: “Why would an institution use blockchain?”Today, the question is increasingly: “How do we use blockchain infrastructure within an institutional framework?”The remaining barriers are mostly around trust and infrastructure: custody, regulation, smart-contract risk, liquidity, reporting, operational controls, and counterparty risk.Institutions don't just need to know what the return is. They need to understand where the return comes from, what risks are being taken to generate it, how they can exit, and who is responsible at every layer.The next phase of institutional adoption isn't about convincing institutions that blockchain matters. It's about making onchain infrastructure something they can actually underwrite.8. Looking five to ten years ahead, what do you think the stablecoin market becomes?I don't think stablecoins will remain just a category of digital cash. I think they will become one of the fundamental layers of the global financial system.Some stablecoins will remain primarily focused on payments and settlement. Others will increasingly be connected to lending, capital markets, treasury management, and other financial applications.But there is another development that I think could be even more transformative: the rise of the agentic economy.We are moving from an internet where humans are the primary economic actors to one where software will increasingly be able to hold money, make decisions, purchase services, and transact autonomously. Companies like Coinbase and Circle are already building wallets and payment infrastructure specifically for AI agents.An AI agent cannot go to a bank every time it needs to make a payment. It needs programmable money that can move 24/7, interact with software, and settle transactions automatically. Stablecoins are very well suited to that environment.Imagine an agent managing a treasury, paying for compute, buying data, or interacting with other agents. It may hold capital for minutes, hours, or days between transactions. That capital could potentially be allocated according to predefined liquidity and risk parameters while remaining available when the agent needs it.This is where I think the idea of productive stablecoins becomes much bigger than simply “earning yield on dollars.”The real opportunity is programmable capital.Capital that can move, earn, settle, and be reallocated automatically according to rules defined by its owner - whether that owner is a person, a company, or eventually an autonomous software agent.So five to ten years from now, I expect stablecoins to be much more than payment and settlement instruments. They could become the financial operating layer of an increasingly agentic economy.Productive Stablecoins: What Comes Next?Roussel’s argument is that the next phase of stablecoin adoption will be less about simply putting dollars onchain and more about what those dollars can do once they arrive. Frgmnt is betting that the complexity of DeFi can increasingly move into the infrastructure layer, while distribution happens through custodians, wallets, fintechs, and other platforms users already rely on.The longer-term vision goes further. If software agents begin holding money, paying for services, and managing capital autonomously, stablecoins may evolve from payment instruments into programmable financial infrastructure. In that model, the defining question will not only be how much capital moves onchain, but how efficiently that capital can be deployed, managed, and reallocated once it gets there.This article was written by FM Contributors at www.financemagnates.com.