The internet has made information free and global. So why is sending money still difficult and expensive?

The early internet envisioned a future where anyone could freely publish, build, and transact—without needing permission. Open, neutral protocols like email and websites sparked waves of innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet somewhere along the way, we deviated from that path.

Today’s global financial system more closely resembles a patchwork of closed corporate monopolies: centralized, restrictive, and extractive. Every financial transaction passes through a complex "Rube Goldberg machine" of intermediaries—POS terminals, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, FX platforms, card networks, and more—each adding cost, delay, and friction. This system functions like a tax on commerce and stifles innovation, turning what should be neutral infrastructure into a bottleneck.

Stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the US dollar—offer a chance to reboot the system and restore the open, permissionless spirit of the early internet to money itself.

The Disruptive Opportunity of Stablecoins

Today’s payment infrastructure wasn’t built for the internet. It was designed around a world of fee-charging intermediaries, intended to manage fraud, local compliance, and operational risk. Even now, international remittances cost up to 10%, with the average fee for sending $200 sitting at 6.62% as of September 2024. For hundreds of millions of workers worldwide, this is a regressive tax.

Traditional payment rails are also bottlenecks for businesses. A B2B payment from Mexico to Vietnam can take 3–7 days and cost $14–150 per $1,000, involving up to five intermediaries. In contrast, stablecoins bypass traditional systems like SWIFT, enabling near-instant and nearly zero-cost cross-border payments.

This isn't just theoretical—it’s already happening. Companies like SpaceX use stablecoins to move funds out of high-volatility countries like Argentina and Nigeria. Meanwhile, ScaleAI uses them to pay global workers more quickly and cost-effectively.

On the B2C front, Stripe became the first mainstream platform to offer crypto payments, charging just 1.5% in fees, half that of traditional systems. For low-margin industries like grocery retail, saving 1.5% could double their profit margins. And with competition among blockchains, fees are expected to fall even further.

Stablecoins are global by design, unlike traditional financial systems. They run on open, programmable, composable blockchains. Businesses don’t need to negotiate with global banks—they just plug into the network. In 2024, stablecoin transaction volume hit $15.6 trillion, nearly matching Visa. While most of that volume reflects financial flows rather than retail payments, it signals a massive transformation in financial infrastructure.

As Stripe put it, this is like "room-temperature superconductors for finance"—frictionless money transmission, much like superconductivity in physics.

Stablecoins Are the WhatsApp Moment of Money

For the first time, money can be open, instant, and borderless—just like email.

Consider how messaging evolved. Before WhatsApp and Telegram, sending a text internationally could cost 30 cents per message, with no guarantee of delivery. Today, anyone can communicate instantly, freely, and globally. Payments today are like SMS in 2008—border-blocked, gated by middlemen, and limited by design.

Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of patching old systems together, they move natively on-chain, with programmability, modularity, and global scalability. Today, stablecoins cut remittance costs drastically: sending $200 from the US to Colombia costs $12.13 via traditional methods, but just $0.01 via stablecoins. While converting stablecoins to local currency still involves some fees (0%–5%), competition is pushing these costs down.

Just as WhatsApp disrupted international calling, stablecoins are disrupting global money flows.

From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: The Regulatory Shift

Though often seen as an obstacle, clear and thoughtful regulation is key to unleashing innovation.

For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) remained siloed within the crypto economy—not because the tech didn’t work, but because legal frameworks made integration with traditional finance difficult.

That’s now changing. Legislators and regulators are working to define stablecoin and crypto markets more clearly, aiming to protect consumers, maintain US competitiveness, and encourage innovation. Laws that differentiate “network tokens” from “securities tokens” can eliminate bad actors and give good builders a roadmap. Congress is even preparing legislation that could become America’s first stablecoin regulatory bill this year.

Building Public Infrastructure for Everyone

Traditional finance is built on closed corporate networks. But the internet has already proven how open protocols like TCP/IP and email enable global coordination and innovation.

Blockchains represent the financial layer of the internet—combining the composability of public protocols with the economic incentives of private enterprise. These systems are neutral, auditable, and programmable. With stablecoins, we are now building truly open monetary infrastructure.

Think of it as a public highway system: companies can still build cars, operate services, and do business—but the roads are open to everyone.

Stablecoins and blockchains aren’t just lowering fees. They’re creating entirely new financial primitives:

• Machine-to-machine payments: automated AI-driven marketplaces.
• Micropayment models: real-time rewards for media, music, or AI contributions.
• Fully auditable payment flows: enabling government transparency.
• Global trade without middlemen: instant, low-cost international commerce—no longer a fantasy.

Today, the technology is mature, the demand is real, and policy is catching up. A stablecoin bill may pass this year, and regulators are drafting better frameworks. Just as early internet entrepreneurs took off once legal clarity emerged, crypto is now ready to cross the threshold—from experiment to infrastructure, led by stablecoins.

We don’t need to patch the old system.

We can build a better one.