Moments when stablecoins redefine the future of payments

There are things visible in the 6-year cryptocurrency payment journey. Raj Parekh started in Visa’s cryptocurrency division, founded Portal Finance, and this year, with Monad’s acquisition, has taken the lead over the entire payment ecosystem. This trajectory itself speaks to the industry’s transformation.

What Traditional Finance Has Realized: Business Efficiency, Not Technology

The announcement of Facebook’s Libra project in 2019 was a shockwave to traditional finance. It was the moment when major financial institutions, including Visa, suddenly recognized cryptocurrency as a serious topic. Although initial partners withdrew due to regulatory pressure, institutions began to systematically organize their crypto teams afterward.

Visa’s perspective is intriguing. They didn’t push technology first but started by identifying real problems. Delays of T+1, T+2 in international payments are not just technical issues but business inefficiencies. Funds can only move during bank operating hours, and transactions completely halt on weekends, which is abnormal.

The case of clients like Crypto.com clarified the picture. During the process of converting crypto assets to fiat currency daily and transferring via SWIFT, delays of over T+2 occurred. To cover this, large sums had to be locked in banks as ‘pre-funding.’ Essentially, money that could generate profit was sitting idle in accounts just to handle payment delays.

The solution was USDC direct payments. The experience of finalizing payments in a few seconds via Ethereum, Anchorage Digital, demonstrated a shift in financial logic, not just technology.

The Abstraction Game of Infrastructure

The founding of Portal Finance was a natural choice. The concept is that when a user swipes a card and receives coffee, dozens of steps happen in the background—communication with banks, network interactions, transaction verification—but all of this should be hidden. The same realization applies to blockchain payments.

Portal aimed to be a platform where developers could easily use stablecoin payments via APIs. Its customer base ranged from large remittance companies like WorldRemit to emerging neo-banks.

However, as the business deepened, a pattern emerged. The EVM ecosystem is the most powerful but slow and expensive, while other chains are faster but fragmented. The clear conclusion was that a system compatible with EVM standards, offering millisecond-level finality, would be the ultimate solution for payments.

This is the background for Monad’s acquisition in July this year.

The Birth of a New Currency Supply

Interesting changes are happening in business models. Early stablecoin issuers’ logic was simple: buy U.S. Treasuries with user deposits, and the issuer earns interest.

But now, new projects like Paxos’ M0 are changing the rules. They transfer the interest generated from underlying assets directly to users and recipients. Some teams are bolder, transferring 100% of U.S. Treasury yields to users and aiming to generate revenue through additional value-added services.

This is not just about adjusting profit sharing. In traditional finance, money only earns interest when deposited. When remittances or payments start, interest stops. But stablecoins broke this limitation. Even as funds flow rapidly and transactions occur, the underlying assets continuously generate income. This marks the birth of a new form of currency supply.

A Major Shift in Global Fintech

The fundamental difference between crypto-based financial technology and traditional fintech is this.

First-generation fintechs(Brazil’s Nubank, US’s Chime) were based on local banking infrastructure. They could only operate within their respective markets. But with stablecoins and blockchain, the situation changes completely. From the very first line of code, the goal is the global market.

New founders are emerging whose aim is the global payment trajectory from the start. Geographical barriers are disappearing. This is an unprecedented level of change in the history of financial technology.

The Clash of AI Agents and High-Frequency Finance

The most anticipated area in the next 3–5 years is the combination of agentic payments(Agentic Payments) and high-frequency finance(High Frequency Finance).

Agents are not limited by human processing speed. In high-throughput systems, the speed of fund transfers and transaction completion is beyond real-time human comprehension. This upgrades from ‘human efficiency’ to ‘algorithm efficiency,’ ultimately to ‘agent efficiency.’

At the same time, account structures are converging. The boundary between investment accounts and payment accounts is blurring. Giants like Coinbase are aiming for an ‘all-in-one app.’ Deposits, coin purchases, stock trading, and participation in prediction markets all occur within the same account.

This underscores why infrastructure remains crucial. Truly abstracting the fundamental components of crypto enables integrated experiences of DeFi transactions, payments, and revenue generation, with users hardly noticing the underlying complexity.

The High-Frequency Transformation of Traditional Finance

Engineers with deep high-frequency trading backgrounds focus not on the trades themselves but on translating these strict algorithmic capabilities into everyday financial tasks.

Imagine a CFO managing multinational funds. They handle dispersed funds across multiple banks and various foreign exchange pairs. In the past, this required extensive manual coordination. In the future, a combination of LLMs and high-performance public blockchains will perform large-scale algorithmic trading and fund adjustments automatically behind the scenes. It will become a reality to optimize all corporate funds at extremely high speeds and scales.

High-frequency trading is no longer exclusive to Wall Street. It is becoming a new standard accessible to companies of all sizes.

The Email Moment of Payments

Raj often uses this analogy. We are at the ‘email moment’ of money.

When email appeared, it wasn’t just about writing letters faster but about transmitting information across the globe in seconds, completely transforming human communication. Similarly, stablecoins and blockchain are the first in human history to move value at internet speeds.

We are currently unable to fully grasp what exactly this will trigger. It could be a reorganization of global supply chain finance, or the zero-cost of remittances.

The most important next step is for this technology to seamlessly integrate into all everyday apps, from YouTube to daily life. When users can enjoy internet-speed fund flows without even noticing the existence of blockchain, that will be the true beginning of our new era.