Chris Dixon: Stablecoins, the "WhatsApp moment" in the world of money
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Chris Dixon: Stablecoins, the "WhatsApp moment" in the world of money
Stablecoins are a way forward, a reset, and a pathway to bring the internet's original vision into the realm of money.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Chris Dixon, Founding Partner at a16z Crypto
Translation: Luffy, Foresight News
The internet made information free and global—so why are money transfers still so difficult and expensive?
The early internet promised a future where anyone could publish, build, or transact without permission. Open, neutral protocols like email and the World Wide Web sparked an explosion of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But along the way, we lost our way.
Today’s global financial system resembles a patchwork of corporate networks: centralized, closed, and extractive. Behind every transaction lies a Rube Goldberg machine of intermediaries—merchants, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchange brokers, card networks, and more—each taking a cut, adding delays, and imposing arbitrary rules. These networks levy unnecessary taxes on commerce, stifle innovation, and introduce high-friction bottlenecks into what should be neutral channels.
Stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar—offer an escape route, a reset, and a path to bring the internet’s original vision into the realm of money.
The Disruptive Opportunity of Stablecoins
The current payment system wasn’t built for the internet; it was designed for a world filled with intermediaries. Even today, international remittance fees can reach as high as 10% (in September 2024, the average cost to send $200 was 6.62%). These aren’t just frictional costs—they’re effectively regressive taxes levied on some of the world’s poorest workers. The inherited system is slow, opaque, and exclusionary, leaving billions either underbanked or entirely excluded from the global financial system.
Traditional payment methods are extremely inefficient for many businesses. B2B payments from Mexico to Vietnam can take 3 to 7 days to settle, costing between $14 and $150 per $1,000 transferred, passing through up to five intermediaries, each skimming a fee. Stablecoins can bypass traditional systems like SWIFT and their associated clearing and settlement processes, enabling such transactions to be nearly instantaneous and virtually free.
This isn’t theoretical—it’s already happening. Companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to manage corporate treasury operations, including repatriating funds from countries with volatile local currencies like Argentina and Nigeria. Others, such as ScaleAI, are using stablecoins to pay global employees faster and cheaper. On the B2C front, Stripe—the first widely adopted service provider offering crypto payments—charges just 1.5% in fees at checkout, half that of traditional payment providers. This could dramatically improve profit margins for certain businesses: as a16z Crypto’s Sam Broner noted, for low-margin businesses like grocery stores, reducing fees by 1.5% could potentially double net profits. And in a competitive blockchain-based market, I expect these transaction fees to fall even further.
Unlike the isolated legacy financial system, stablecoins are inherently global. They operate on blockchains—open, programmable networks where anyone can build applications without negotiating with dozens of cross-border banks, simply by connecting to the network. People are already recognizing these advantages. In 2024, stablecoins transferred $15.6 trillion in value—on par with Visa’s transaction volume. While this figure primarily reflects capital flows rather than retail payments, its scale nonetheless signals we are on the brink of a transformation in financial infrastructure—one no longer reliant on stitching together 20th-century systems.
Instead, we can now build something entirely new—truly internet-native—what Stripe calls a “room-temperature superconductor for financial services,” where instead of lossless energy transmission, we achieve lossless value transfer.
The “WhatsApp Moment” for Money
Stablecoins represent our first real chance to do for money what email did for communication: make it open, instant, and borderless.
Consider the evolution of text messaging. Before apps like WhatsApp, sending a cross-border SMS cost 30 cents—and even then, delivery wasn’t guaranteed. Then came internet-native instant messaging: instant, global, and free. Today’s payments are where SMS was in 2008—fragmented by borders, burdened by intermediaries, and artificially constrained.
Stablecoins offer a fundamentally different alternative. Rather than cobbling together clunky, expensive, outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly across global blockchains. These systems are programmable and composable. Stablecoins are already slashing remittance costs: sending $200 from the U.S. to Colombia costs $12.13 via traditional methods, but only $0.01 with stablecoins. Fees for converting stablecoins into local currency range from 5% down to 0%, and continue to decline due to competition.
Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international calling, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming how money moves globally.
Regulation: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough
It's easy to view regulation as an obstacle—but smart legislation may actually be the key to unlocking the next phase.
Establishing clear rules for stablecoins and crypto markets could finally move these technologies out of experimental status and into broad adoption. For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been trapped in a self-contained crypto economy—not because the tools were useless, but because regulators made integration with traditional finance extremely difficult.
This is changing. Policymakers are now actively crafting rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in ways that maintain U.S. competitiveness, protect consumers, and allow innovation to flourish. Thoughtful regulation can deter bad actors while giving compliant participants clear guardrails for building. Indeed, an upcoming bill clarifying this regulatory framework could pave the way for broader adoption and deeper integration into the global financial system.
Building Public Goods That Work for Everyone
Traditional finance is built on private, closed networks. But the internet has shown us the power of open protocols—like TCP/IP and email—to enable global coordination and innovation.
Blockchains are the internet-native financial layer. They combine the composability of public protocols with the economic incentives of private enterprise, delivering reliable neutrality, auditability, and programmability. Add stablecoins, and we get something we’ve never truly had before: open monetary infrastructure.
Think of it as a public highway system: private companies can still build vehicles, run businesses, and create roadside attractions—but the roads themselves are neutral and open to all.
Blockchain networks and stablecoins do more than just reduce fees—they enable entirely new categories of software:
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Programmable payments between machines: Imagine AI agents autonomously facilitating markets for computing resources and other services.
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Micro-payments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with simple rules and letting a “smart” wallet distribute payments automatically.
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Transparent payments with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track government spending.
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Global commerce without cumbersome intermediaries: Imagine completing international transactions instantly and at minimal cost—in fact, you don’t need to imagine, because it’s already happening.
The era of blockchain networks and stablecoins has arrived: technology, market demand, and political will are converging. A stablecoin bill may be introduced this year, and regulators are weighing frameworks to match risk with appropriate oversight. Just as early internet startups flourished once it became clear they wouldn’t be shut down by telecom companies or copyright lawyers, crypto is now poised to transition from financial experiment to foundational infrastructure—with stablecoins leading the charge.
We don’t have to patch the old system—we can build a better one.
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