Author: Sleepy.txt, Dongcha Beating
Original Title: Stepping into the Stablecoin Wave for Six Years, He Sees the Embryonic Form of the Future of Payments
This year is destined to be recorded in financial history as the "Year of Stablecoins," and the current buzz may only be the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, there has been a undercurrent for six years.
In 2019, when Facebook's stablecoin project Libra shocked the traditional financial world like a depth charge, Raj Parekh was at the epicenter at Visa.
As the head of Visa's cryptocurrency division, Raj personally witnessed the psychological shift of this traditional financial giant from观望 to joining the game. It was a moment of non-consensus.
At that time, the arrogance of traditional finance coexisted with the immaturity of blockchain. Raj's experience at Visa made him painfully aware of the industry's invisible ceiling. It wasn't that financial institutions didn't want to innovate, but the infrastructure at the time simply couldn't support "global payments."
Driven by this pain point, he founded Portal Finance, attempting to build better middleware for crypto payments. However, after serving numerous clients, he found that no matter how much the application layer was optimized, the underlying performance bottleneck remained the ceiling.
Eventually, the Portal team was acquired by the Monad Foundation, with Raj leading the payment ecosystem. In our view, he is the ideal person to review this experiment on efficiency, as he understands both the business logic of the stablecoin application layer and the underlying mechanics of crypto payments.
Not long ago, we spoke with Raj about the development of stablecoins in recent years. We need to clarify the driving force behind the current stablecoin hype. Is it the feasible boundaries set by regulation, the willingness of giants to finally enter the field, or the more practical calculus of profit and efficiency?
More importantly, a new industry consensus is forming—stablecoins are not just assets in the crypto world but could become the next generation of infrastructure for clearing and capital flow.
But questions also arise: How long will this hype last? Which narratives will be disproven, and which will solidify into long-term structures? Raj's perspective is valuable because he hasn't been observing from the shore but has always been fighting in the water.
In Raj's narrative, he refers to the development of stablecoins as the "email moment" for money—a future where capital flow is as cheap and instant as sending a message. But he also admits that he hasn't fully figured out what this will ultimately unleash.
The following is Raj's account, compiled and published by Dongcha Beating:
Problem-First, Not Technology-First
If I had to pinpoint a starting point for all this, I'd say it was 2019.
I was at Visa then, and the atmosphere in the entire financial industry was very微妙. Facebook suddenly launched its Libra stablecoin plan. Before that, most traditional financial institutions viewed cryptocurrency either as a geek's toy or a speculative tool. But Libra was different; it made everyone realize that if you didn't get a seat at this table, there might be no place for you in the future.
Visa was one of the first companies publicly listed as a partner for the Libra project. Libra was very special at the time. It was a very early, very large, and very ambitious attempt that brought many different companies together around blockchain and crypto for the first time. Although it didn't最终落地 as everyone initially expected, it was indeed a very important watershed event that made many traditional institutions seriously treat crypto as an issue for the first time, not just a fringe experiment.
Of course, this was followed by tremendous regulatory pressure. Later, in October 2019, companies like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe withdrew one after another.
But after Libra happened, not just Visa, but also Mastercard and other Libra members began to more formally systematize their crypto teams. On one hand, it was to better manage partners and networks; on the other hand, it was to actually build products and elevate it into a more holistic strategy.
My career actually started at the intersection of cybersecurity and payments. For the first half of my time at Visa, I was primarily building a security platform to help banks understand and respond to data breaches, vulnerability exploits, and hacker attacks—the focus was on risk management. It was during this process that I began to understand blockchain from a payment and fintech perspective, always seeing it as an open-source payment system. The most震撼的一点 was that I had never seen a technology that could move value at such high speed, 24/7, globally.
At the same time, I also saw very clearly that Visa's底层 still relied on the banking system, on relatively old technology stacks like Mainframes and wire transfers. For me, that kind of open-source system that could also "move value" was very attractive. My intuition at the time was simple: the infrastructure that systems like Visa rely on will likely be gradually rewritten by systems like blockchain in the future.
After the Visa Crypto team was formed, we didn't rush to push technology. This team was one of the smartest, most capable groups of builders I've ever seen. They understood both traditional finance and traditional payment systems, and also had deep respect and understanding for the crypto ecosystem. The crypto world, ultimately, has a strong "community属性." If you want to get things done here, it's hard not to understand and integrate into it.
Ultimately, Visa is a payment network. We had to focus a lot of energy on how to empower our partners, such as payment service providers, banks, fintech companies, and on what efficiency problems existed in our cross-border settlement processes.
So our approach wasn't to force a certain technology onto Visa first, but rather to first identify the real problems within Visa and then see if blockchain could solve them in certain环节.
If you look at the settlement chain, you see a very直观的问题. Since fund settlement is T+1, T+2, why can't it be "second-level settlement"? If it could be done in seconds, what would it bring to treasury teams? For example, banks close at 5 PM, so what if treasury teams could initiate settlements at night? Or what about weekends, which traditionally have no settlement—what if settlement could happen seven days a week?
This is why Visa later turned to USDC. We decided to use it as a new settlement mechanism within the Visa system,真正落进 Visa's existing system. Many people might not understand why Visa would conduct settlement tests on Ethereum. In 2020 and 2021, that sounded crazy.
For example, Crypto.com is a major client of Visa. In the traditional settlement process, Crypto.com had to sell their crypto assets daily, convert them to fiat, and then wire them to Visa via SWIFT or ACH. This process was very painful. First, there's the time—SWIFT isn't real-time; there's a lag of T+2 or even longer. To ensure settlements didn't default, Crypto.com had to lock up a large amount of collateral in the bank—this is所谓的 "pre-funding."
This money could have been used to generate returns through business, but instead, it was stuck idle on the books just to cope with that slow settlement cycle. We thought, since Crypto.com's business is built on USDC, why not settle directly in USDC?
So we approached Anchorage Digital, a digital asset bank with a federal charter. We initiated the first test transaction on Ethereum. When that USDC moved from Crypto.com's address to Visa's address at Anchorage and finalized settlement within seconds, the feeling was very奇妙.
The Fault Line in Infrastructure
My experience with stablecoin settlement at Visa made me painfully aware of one thing: the industry infrastructure is too immature.
I've always understood payments and fund flow as a "completely abstracted experience." For example, when you buy coffee at a coffee shop, the user just swipes their card, completes the transaction, and gets coffee; the merchant gets paid. It's that simple. The user doesn't know how many steps happen底层: communicating with your bank, interacting with the network, confirming the transaction, completing clearing and settlement...所有这些都应该被彻底隐藏起来, invisible to the user.
So I view blockchain the same way. It is indeed a great settlement technology, but it should ultimately be abstracted away through infrastructure and application-layer services, so users don't need to understand the complexity of the chain. This is why I decided to leave Visa and start Portal—to create a developer-facing platform allowing any fintech company to接入稳定币支付 like connecting an API.
Honestly, I never imagined Portal would be acquired. For me, it was more like a sense of mission. I see "building an open-source payment system" as the work of my life. I felt that if I could play even a small role in making on-chain transactions easier to use and getting open-source systems into daily use scenarios, it would still be a huge opportunity.
Our clients included traditional remittance giants like WorldRemit and many emerging Neobanks. But as we delved deeper, we fell into a strange loop.
Some might ask, why build infrastructure instead of applications then? After all, many people now complain that "too much infrastructure is being built, but there aren't enough applications." I think this is actually a cycle issue. Generally, better infrastructure comes first, which then催生 new applications; as new applications emerge, they in turn催生 the next round of new infrastructure. This is the "application-infrastructure" cycle.
At that time, we saw the infrastructure layer wasn't mature enough, so I felt it was more natural to start from infrastructure. Our goal was to work on two parallel tracks: on one hand, partner with large applications that already had distribution, ecosystems, and transaction volume; on the other hand, make it very simple for early-stage companies and developers to start building.
In pursuit of performance, Portal supported various chains like Solana, Polygon, Tron, etc. But绕来绕去, we always came back to the same conclusion: the network effect of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) ecosystem is too strong. Developers are here, liquidity is here.
This created a悖论: the EVM ecosystem is the strongest, but it's too slow and expensive; other chains are fast, but the ecosystems are fragmented. We thought then, if one day a system could emerge that is both compatible with the EVM standard and achieves high performance with sub-second confirmation, that would be the ultimate answer for payments. So in July of this year, we accepted the Monad Foundation's acquisition of Portal, and I began leading支付业务 at Monad.
Many people ask me, aren't there already too many public chains? Why do we need a new chain? This question itself might be wrong. It's not "why do we need a new chain," but "have the existing chains really solved the core problems of payments?"
If you ask those who are actually moving large amounts of capital, they will tell you that what they care about most is not how new the chain is or how good the story is, but whether the unit economics work. What is the cost per transaction? Can the confirmation time meet business needs? Is the liquidity deep enough across different forex corridors? These are very practical questions.
For example, sub-second finality sounds like a technical metric, but it corresponds to real money. If a payment requires 15 minutes of waiting for confirmation, it is commercially unusable. But having this alone is not enough. You also need to build a庞大的生态 around the payment system: stablecoin issuers, on/off-ramp service providers, market makers, liquidity providers—these roles are indispensable.
I often use an analogy: we are in the "email moment" for money. Remember when email first appeared? It didn't just make letter-writing faster; it allowed information to reach the other side of the globe in seconds,彻底改变 human communication.
I see stablecoins and blockchain the same way. This is an ability to move value at internet speed, unseen in the history of human civilization. We haven't even fully thought through what it will unleash. It could mean the重塑 of global supply chain finance, it could mean remittance costs dropping to zero.
But the most critical next step is how this technology is seamlessly integrated into YouTube, into every daily app on your phone. When users don't feel the existence of blockchain but enjoy internet-speed capital flow, that's when we truly begin.
Earning Interest in Flow: The Evolution of Stablecoin Business Models
In July of this year, the U.S. signed the《GENIUS Act》, and the industry landscape is undergoing subtle changes. The certain moat advantage that Circle once built is beginning to fade, and the core driver behind this is a fundamental shift in business models.
In the past, the business logic of early stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle was very simple and direct. Users deposited money, they used that money to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, and all the interest income generated belonged entirely to the issuer. This was the game rule of the first phase.
But now, if you look at new projects like Paxos to M0, you'll see the rules have changed. These new players are starting to pass on the interest income generated by the underlying assets directly to users and recipients. This isn't just an adjustment in profit distribution; I believe it actually creates a new financial primitive we've never seen before—a new form of money supply.
In the traditional financial world, money in the bank earns interest only when it sits idle. Once you start transferring, paying, the money typically doesn't earn interest during the flow process.
But stablecoins break this limitation. Even when funds are flowing, being paid, or transacted at high speed, the underlying assets continue to generate interest. This opens up a whole new possibility: no longer just earning interest while static, but also earning while in flow.
Of course, we are in the very early experimental stages of this new model. I've also seen some teams trying more radical approaches, conducting large-scale U.S. Treasury management behind the scenes, even planning to pass on 100% of the interest to users. You might ask, what do they earn then? Their logic is to rely on other value-added products and services built around the stablecoin for profit, not on eating the interest differential.
So, although it's just the beginning, after the GENIUS Act, the trend is very clear: every major bank, every major fintech company, is seriously thinking about how to join this game. The future business models of stablecoins will definitely not stop at simple deposit interest.
Besides stablecoins, crypto neo-banks have also received great attention this year. Combining past experience in payments, I believe there is one core difference between traditional Fintech and crypto Fintech.
The first generation of fintech companies, like Brazil's Nubank or the U.S.'s Chime, were built essentially on the本土银行基础设施 of their respective markets. Their底层 relies on the local banking system. This leads to an inevitable result: their service targets are死死限制住了, basically只能服务本土用户.
But when you build products based on stablecoins and blockchain, the situation changes completely.
You are actually building products on a global payment rail, something we have never seen in financial history. The change this brings is颠覆性的. You no longer need to be a single-country Fintech enterprise. You can, from day one, build a全球化新型银行面向 multi-country users, even global users.
This is what I see as the biggest unlock. In the entire history of fintech, we have almost never seen this level of "global from the start." This model is催生 a batch of全新的 founders, builders, and products that are no longer limited by geographic fences. From the first line of code, their target is the global market.
Agent Payments and the Future of High-Frequency Finance
If you ask me what excites me most in the next three to five years, it's definitely the combination of AI Agent (Agentic Payments) and High-Frequency Finance.
A few weeks ago, we just held a hackathon in San Francisco on the theme of AI and cryptocurrency integration. A large number of developers emerged. For example, one project integrated the U.S. food delivery platform DoorDash with on-chain payments. We are already starting to see this苗头. Agents are no longer limited by human processing speed.
On high-throughput systems, the speed at which Agents move funds and complete transactions is so fast that the human brain might not be able to understand it in real-time. This isn't just about being a bit faster; it's a fundamental shift in workflow: we are upgrading from "human efficiency" to "algorithm efficiency," and ultimately to "Agent efficiency." To support this leap from millisecond to microsecond efficiency, the underlying blockchain performance must be robust enough.
At the same time, the form of user accounts is also converging. In the past, your investment account and payment account were separate, but now this boundary is blurring.
This is actually a natural selection at the product level and something giants like Coinbase most want to do. They want to become your "Everything App"—saving money, buying crypto, buying stocks, even participating in prediction markets, all within the same account. This way, they can lock users firmly into their ecosystem, not handing over deposit and behavioral data to others.
This is precisely why infrastructure remains important. Because only by truly abstracting away those underlying crypto components can DeFi trading, payments, earning yield, and other activities be叠加进 a unified experience, with users barely feeling the underlying complexity.
Some of my colleagues have a strong background in high-frequency trading, accustomed to using extremely low-latency systems on CME or stock trading platforms for large-scale transactions. But what excites me is not continuing to do trading, but migrating this rigorous engineering capability and algorithm-driven decision-making mechanism to real-world daily financial workflows.
Imagine a financial manager handling跨国资金, needing to manage vast funds scattered across different banks involving multiple forex pairs. In the past, this required a lot of manual scheduling. But in the future, if LLMs are combined with high-performance public chains, the system could automatically conduct large-scale algorithmic trading and fund scheduling behind the scenes, thereby allowing the entire funds management operation to earn more yield.
Abstracting the capability of "high-frequency trading" and migrating it to more different real-world workflows. This is no longer the patent of Wall Street, but rather letting algorithms optimize every penny of an enterprise at极高的速度和规模. This is the truly期待的新类别 of the future.
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