From payment challenges to future infrastructure: a crypto payment expert's perspective on the stablecoin wave

The true value of stablecoins may not lie in the currency itself, but in how they are reshaping the infrastructure of global capital flows.

“Stablecoin Awakening” in Career Trajectory

2019 was a turning point. While Facebook’s Libra project shook the traditional finance world, Raj Parekh was working in Visa’s cryptocurrency division. At that time, traditional financial institutions still held divided views on digital assets—some saw them as geek toys, others as speculative tools. But Libra changed all that, making Wall Street realize that if they didn’t get involved, there might be no seat at the table in the future.

Visa became one of the earliest public partners of Libra. Although the project ultimately faced regulatory pressure and was abandoned, the real significance of this event was that it forced traditional financial giants to take digital assets seriously—not just as speculation, but as infrastructure.

Raj’s background is quite interesting—his career began at the intersection of cybersecurity and payments. During his early years at Visa, he mainly built security frameworks to help banks respond to data breaches and cyberattacks. It was during this process that he started viewing blockchain through the lens of payments and fintech.

“I’ve never seen any technology achieve 24/7 global value flow like blockchain,” Raj once described his intuition. At the same time, he saw that Visa relied on outdated banking infrastructure—mainframes, wire transfer systems. The appeal of blockchain as an open-source payment system lies here: it can do things traditional systems cannot.

Problem-First, Not Technology-First

Many people associate crypto technology with concepts like decentralization and smart contracts. But Raj’s approach is entirely different—he emphasizes “problem-first, not technology-first.”

After forming a crypto team at Visa, he didn’t rush to promote new tech. Instead, their approach was to deeply analyze business processes and identify specific pain points. For example, the settlement cycle in cross-border payments: why must it be T+1 or T+2? What if instant payments were possible? What would that mean for finance departments and treasury teams?

This way of thinking directly led to the application of USDC. Visa’s most famous case was its partnership with Crypto.com. In traditional processes, Crypto.com sells some of its crypto assets daily to convert to fiat, then transfers via SWIFT or ACH to Visa—this is time-consuming and requires them to hold large “pre-funding” deposits at banks as collateral, money that could be used for business but remains idle.

When Visa and Anchorage Digital conducted their first experimental transaction—transferring USDC directly from Crypto.com’s address to Visa’s bank account—only a few seconds elapsed—Raj realized this was not just about speed; it was a complete rewrite of the payment logic.

Infrastructure Breakdowns and Rebuilding

But after establishing Portal Finance, Raj encountered a deeper problem. Even if application layers are optimized, underlying performance bottlenecks still exist—these are hard limits that software cannot solve.

Portal served traditional remittance giants like WorldRemit and collaborated with emerging neobanks. But he gradually realized: no matter how well-designed the payment application, if the underlying infrastructure can’t keep up, everything is futile.

Here lies a paradox: the EVM ecosystem (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is the most powerful, with developers and liquidity concentrated there. But it’s too slow and costly. Other blockchains are faster but fragmented. So Raj formed a hypothesis: if there were a chain that was EVM-compatible and also highly performant, with confirmation times under a second, it would be the perfect solution for payments.

This hypothesis drove him to join Monad Foundation. In July this year, the Portal team was acquired by Monad, and Raj began leading the development of Monad’s payment ecosystem.

When asked, “There are already so many blockchains, why create a new one?” Raj’s sharper response was: “It’s not about why a new chain, but whether existing chains solve the core problems of payments.”

What do participants in large-scale capital flows care about? Not “what’s the new story,” but whether unit economics are healthy—what’s the cost per transaction? Can confirmation speeds meet business needs? Is liquidity in the exchange rate corridors deep enough? These are the most practical concerns.

Evolution of Stablecoin Business Models

In July this year, the US passed the GENIUS Act, and the stablecoin industry landscape is subtly shifting.

Traditional stablecoin business models are simple: user deposits USD → issuing institution buys US bonds → earns all interest. Tether and Circle initially profited heavily from this logic.

But new entrants are changing the game. Projects like Paxos and M0 are starting to directly distribute the interest from underlying assets to users and recipients. This is not just profit sharing; it’s creating a new financial prototype—a new form of money supply.

In traditional finance, bank deposits only accrue interest when idle. Once you transfer or pay, the funds usually don’t generate returns during the flow. But stablecoins break this boundary: even as funds move rapidly, trade, and pay, the underlying assets continue to generate yield.

Some more aggressive teams even aim to return 100% of the yield to users. How do they profit? The answer lies in value-added services and products built around stablecoins—this is a completely new business model.

Post-GENIUS Act, this trend has become irreversible: every major bank and fintech company is seriously considering how to participate. The future of stablecoin business models will certainly go beyond “saving for interest.”

The Geographical Revolution of Fintech New Wave

Traditional fintech companies face a destiny: they are always anchored to a country’s banking infrastructure. Nubank operates mainly in Brazil, Chime focuses on the US market—these are fundamentally due to reliance on local banking systems.

This leads to an inevitable result: service scope is limited by geographic boundaries.

But when your product is built on stablecoins and blockchain, everything changes. You are effectively building a truly global payment rail—unprecedented in financial history.

This shift is revolutionary: you no longer need to be a “Fintech of a certain country,” but can target global markets from the very first line of code, immediately serving multiple countries, even truly global users.

In fintech history, hardly any model starts with such a global perspective. It’s a new door that’s been opened, and a new generation of founders and builders are walking through it.

Capital Flow Revolution in the AI Era

If you ask Raj what excites him most in the next 3 to 5 years, he would say: the integration of AI Agents with high-frequency finance.

A few weeks ago, Monad hosted a hackathon in San Francisco themed around AI and crypto integration. The projects were diverse—some combined US food delivery platform DoorDash with on-chain payments. Raj observes: Agents are no longer limited by human processing speed.

In high-throughput systems, Agents moving capital and executing trades are now faster than the human brain can comprehend in real time. This is not just speed; it’s a fundamental workflow reshaping: from “human efficiency” to “algorithm efficiency,” and ultimately to “Agent efficiency.”

To support this millisecond-to-microsecond leap, the underlying blockchain performance must be extremely robust.

Meanwhile, the form of user accounts is also merging. Investment accounts and payment accounts used to be separate, but that boundary is now blurred. This is a natural evolution at the product level—and what giants like Coinbase are eager to do: become a “super app”—transferring funds, buying crypto, stocks, participating in prediction markets—all in one account, with complete control over user data and behavior.

This is also why infrastructure remains critical. Only when you abstract away all the complexities of the underlying cryptography can you fully integrate DeFi trading, payments, yield generation, and other functions into a seamless experience—users almost don’t feel the underlying complexity.

Raj’s colleagues include some with high-frequency trading backgrounds, accustomed to using ultra-low latency systems at CME and stock exchanges for massive trades. But what excites him most isn’t continuing high-frequency trading itself, but transplanting that rigorous technical capability and algorithmic decision-making into everyday financial workflows.

Imagine a CFO managing cross-border capital, handling large sums dispersed across multiple banks and currencies. Traditional methods require manual coordination, but in the future, with large language models combined with high-performance public chains, systems could automatically execute algorithmic trades, optimize capital allocation behind the scenes, and maximize overall fund management returns.

High-frequency trading capabilities are no longer exclusive to Wall Street—they are abstracted and applied to countless real-world business processes. This is the truly exciting new market—using algorithms to precisely optimize every dollar of capital flow, scaling and speeding up to unprecedented levels.

This is not just a technological revolution, but a fundamental upgrade in how capital operates.