Stablecoin and the puzzle of global payments: When speed becomes the key element to unlock the cycle already underway

The year 2024 could go down in history as the moment when the industry finally understood what stablecoins truly mean. But this awareness didn’t come out of nowhere: it is the culmination of six years of experiments, failures, and silent iterations that began to take shape in 2019.

The Turning Point: From 2019 to Today

When a major global payments company decided to publicly partner with an ambitious stablecoin project, the traditional financial sector came to a halt. That move was not just a technical partnership; it was a signal: cryptocurrencies were about to become a serious matter, no longer a marginal experiment.

What followed was intense regulatory pressure. Many international financial giants withdrew from that initiative in October 2019. But the damage was already done—in the best possible sense. It created a rupture in the established narrative, pushing traditional institutions to formalize dedicated crypto teams, not as a game, but as part of their core strategy.

Over these six years, the cycle of bridging applications and infrastructure began to move. Initially, many thought that simply pushing blockchain technology onto existing payment systems would suffice. The reality proved more complex: first, the right infrastructure needed to be built, which would then generate more robust applications, which in turn would require even higher-performing infrastructure. A continuous cycle of improvement.

The Infrastructure Gap as a Bottleneck

The architecture of traditional payments remains based on outdated technologies: banking mainframes, transfers with T+1 or T+2 settlement. For those managing international remittances or multinational treasury operations, each hour of delay means blocked liquidity, opportunity costs lost.

Those who tried to build an alternative, operating simultaneously on multiple blockchains, faced a frustrating paradox: the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem concentrates all liquidity and network effects, yet suffers from congestion and high costs. Alternative chains offer speed but have fragmented ecosystems where liquidity is dispersed.

The theoretical solution seems obvious: an EVM-compatible blockchain, but with sub-second performance and minimal fees. This is the real enigma the sector is trying to solve, because it’s not a matter of “why do we need another blockchain,” but “which infrastructure can truly support global payments at Internet speed?”

The Transformation of the Business Model

After the so-called “GENIUS Act,” the stablecoin landscape is undergoing a radical transformation. Previous business models, mainly based on earning interest on deposits, are giving way to something more sophisticated.

New issuers are emerging that redistribute the generated interest from underlying assets to users. This is not just a matter of fairness: it represents a primitive financial innovation never seen before. In the traditional banking system, transferred money stops generating yield during movement. Stablecoins invert this logic: even during high-speed payments, the underlying assets continue to accrue interest.

Some teams are experimenting with even more radical approaches, transferring all yields to users. How do they profit then? Through value-added services built around the payment ecosystem itself. This paradigm shift explains why every major financial institution is seriously considering how to enter this space.

The Revolution of Global Fintech

The real discontinuity between traditional fintech and crypto fintech lies in a seemingly technical detail but of enormous strategic importance: localization versus globality.

First-generation digital banks remained tied to local infrastructure: they had to operate within national regulatory constraints, which meant a virtually limited user base. With the advent of blockchain and stablecoins, everything changes. A team can launch a financial application on day one targeting a global market, without facing the bottlenecks of localized licenses or regional intermediaries.

This represents the most significant paradigm shift in fintech history: for the first time, the concept of “national bank” becomes an anomaly compared to the native potential of a “global on-chain bank.”

The Next Chapter: Payments and Artificial Intelligence

Looking ahead 3-5 years, the intersection of AI Agents and high-frequency finance represents the true frontier. It’s no longer about optimizing speed for humans but enabling algorithms to operate at scales and speeds incomprehensible to biology.

Agents are not limited by the rhythm of the human brain. On blockchains with ultra-low latency, they can execute transactions and treasury operations at millisecond, soon microsecond, speeds. This is not incremental improvement: it’s a metamorphosis in financial workflows, from human efficiency to algorithmic efficiency.

At the same time, the boundaries between investment accounts and payment accounts are blurring. Platforms aim to become “super financial apps”: in a single account, you can deposit, buy assets, participate in predictive markets, all integrated transparently, with DeFi and payments overlapping without the user perceiving the underlying complexity.

Some high-frequency trading experts are already transferring their sophisticated algorithmic decision mechanisms from traditional financial markets to ordinary corporate finance workflows. A treasury manager managing multinational funds in different currencies could entrust automated systems with liquidity management optimization, maximizing returns on every transaction, with speeds and precision only algorithms can guarantee.

Toward the “Email Moment of Money”

If we consider the history of communication, email represented a conceptual leap: it not only accelerated message transmission but made possible a speed of information exchange previously unimaginable, radically transforming how humans interact.

Stablecoins on blockchain represent the equivalent for value transfer: for the first time in civilization’s history, fund movement can occur at Internet speed, 24/7, without geographic intermediaries. But we are still at the beginning of understanding what all this will truly generate.

The real milestone is not making experts understand blockchain, but integrating it so deeply into daily applications—delivery apps, streaming services—that the average user won’t even be aware of an underlying blockchain, but will simply experience the speed and efficiency of instant money transfer, like sending a message.

Only then will we truly unlock the cycle already started six years ago, turning the promise into tangible reality.