Six years into the stablecoin wave, he sees the emerging shape of the future of payments
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Six years into the stablecoin wave, he sees the emerging shape of the future of payments
This is an unprecedented ability in the history of human civilization—to move value at internet speed.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsInterview: Jack, Kaori
Editing: Sleepy.txt
This year is destined to go down in financial history as the "Year of Stablecoins," so today's frenzy might just be the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies six years of undercurrents.
In 2019, when Facebook’s stablecoin initiative Libra exploded like a deep-sea bomb and startled the traditional financial world, Raj Parekh was at the epicenter—inside Visa.
As head of cryptocurrency at Visa, Raj personally experienced the psychological shift of this traditional financial giant from观望 to active participation—a moment of non-consensus.
At that time, traditional finance's arrogance coexisted with blockchain's immaturity. Raj’s experience at Visa painfully revealed the industry’s invisible ceiling: it wasn’t that financial institutions didn’t want innovation, but rather that the existing infrastructure simply couldn’t support “global payments.”
Driven by this pain point, he founded Portal Finance, aiming to build better middleware for crypto payments. Yet after serving numerous clients, he realized that no matter how much the application layer improved, the performance bottleneck at the base layer remained an insurmountable ceiling.
Eventually, the Portal team was acquired by the Monad Foundation, with Raj taking the helm of its payment ecosystem.
In our view, he is the ideal person—someone who deeply understands both the business logic of stablecoin applications and the underlying mechanics of crypto payments. No one is better suited to review this experiment in efficiency.
Recently, we spoke with Raj about the evolution of stablecoins over recent years. We need to clarify what is driving the current surge in stablecoin interest: Is it regulatory boundaries becoming clearer? The willingness of giants to finally step in? Or more pragmatic considerations around profit and efficiency?
More importantly, a new industry consensus is forming—that stablecoins are not merely assets within the crypto world, but could become the foundational infrastructure for next-generation clearing and capital flows.
But questions follow: How long will this momentum last? Which narratives will be debunked, and which will solidify into lasting structures? Raj’s perspective is valuable precisely because he isn’t watching from the shore—he’s been swimming in the water all along.
In Raj’s telling, he refers to the development of stablecoins as the “email moment” for money—a future where transferring funds is as cheap and instant as sending a message. Still, he admits he hasn’t fully figured out what this will ultimately enable.
Below is Raj’s account, edited and published by TechFlow:
Problem First, Not Technology First
If I had to pinpoint a starting point, I’d say 2019.
I was at Visa then, and the atmosphere across the financial industry was delicate. Facebook suddenly launched its Libra stablecoin project. Before that, most traditional financial institutions viewed cryptocurrencies either as geeks’ toys or speculative tools. But Libra was different—it made everyone realize that if you didn’t take a seat at the table, you might have no place in the future.
Visa was one of the first companies publicly listed as a Libra partner. At the time, Libra was exceptional—an early, large-scale, highly ambitious attempt that brought together diverse companies around blockchain and crypto for the first time.
The final outcome didn’t materialize as initially expected, but it was undeniably a watershed moment—one that forced traditional institutions to treat crypto as a serious issue, not just a fringe experiment.
Naturally, intense regulatory pressure followed, and by October 2019, companies like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe had withdrawn.
Yet after Libra, not only Visa but also Mastercard and other Libra members began systematically formalizing their crypto teams. This was partly to manage partnerships and networks more effectively, but also to develop real products and elevate crypto into a coherent strategic pillar.
My career began at the intersection of cybersecurity and payments. During my early days at Visa, I focused on building a security platform to help banks understand and respond to data breaches, exploits, and cyberattacks—the core being risk management.
It was during this time that I started viewing blockchain through the lens of payments and fintech, seeing it fundamentally as an open-source payment system. The most striking aspect was witnessing a technology enabling value to move globally at unprecedented speed, 7×24, without interruption.
At the same time, I clearly saw that Visa’s foundation still relied on the banking system and older tech stacks like mainframes and wire transfers.
To me, an open-source system capable of moving value was extremely compelling. My intuition was simple: the infrastructure underlying systems like Visa would likely be rewritten over time by blockchain-like systems.
After the formation of the Visa Crypto team, we didn’t rush to push technology. This team included some of the smartest, most hands-on builders I’ve ever met—people who deeply understood traditional finance and payments, yet also respected and grasped the crypto ecosystem.
The crypto world has strong community attributes. If you want to succeed here, you must understand and integrate into it.
Visa is a payment network, so we focused intensely on empowering our partners—payment providers, banks, fintech firms—and identifying inefficiencies in cross-border settlement processes.
Our approach wasn’t to force a technology onto Visa. Instead, we prioritized identifying real internal problems and assessing whether blockchain could solve them at specific points.
Looking at the settlement chain, one issue stands out: if fund transfers take T+1 or T+2, why not achieve “second-level settlement”? What would that mean for treasury and finance teams? For example, banks close at 5 PM—what if treasury teams could initiate settlements at night? Weekends are traditionally settlement-free—what if we could settle seven days a week?
This is why Visa later turned to USDC—we decided to adopt it as a new settlement mechanism within the Visa network, integrating it directly into our existing systems. Many may not understand why Visa would run settlement tests on Ethereum. Back in 2020–2021, that sounded insane.
Crypto.com, a major Visa client, under traditional processes had to sell off their crypto assets daily, convert to fiat, and send funds via SWIFT or ACH wires to Visa.
This process was painful. First, timing: SWIFT isn’t real-time, leading to T+2 delays or longer. To prevent settlement defaults, Crypto.com had to lock up large sums as collateral—“pre-funding.”
This capital, which could otherwise generate returns through business operations, sat idle solely due to the slow settlement cycle. We asked: since Crypto.com’s business runs on USDC, why not settle directly in USDC?
So we partnered with Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered digital asset bank. We executed our first test transaction on Ethereum. When USDC moved from Crypto.com’s address to Visa’s Anchorage wallet and achieved final settlement in seconds, the feeling was extraordinary.
The Infrastructure Gap
My experience with stablecoin settlements at Visa painfully revealed one truth: the industry’s infrastructure is immature.
I’ve always seen payments and fund movement as a “fully abstracted experience.” For example, buying coffee—you swipe, complete the transaction, get your drink; the merchant receives payment. Simple. You don’t know—or need to know—about the backend steps: communication with your bank, network interactions, transaction confirmation, clearing and settlement—all of which should be completely hidden.
Blockchain is no different. It’s a powerful settlement technology, but ultimately, infrastructure and application layers must abstract away its complexity so users don’t need to understand chains.
This is why I left Visa to found Portal—a developer platform allowing any fintech company to integrate stablecoin payments as easily as plugging in an API.
To be honest, I never imagined Portal would be acquired. To me, it felt more like a mission. I see “building open-source payment systems” as a lifelong pursuit.
I believed that even playing a small role in making on-chain transactions easier and bringing open-source systems into everyday use would be a tremendous opportunity.
Our clients ranged from remittance giants like WorldRemit to emerging neobanks. But as we scaled, we fell into a loop.
Some might ask: Why build infrastructure instead of applications? After all, many now complain there’s too much infrastructure and not enough apps. But this reflects a cyclical pattern.
Typically, better infrastructure comes first, enabling new applications. As applications emerge, they in turn drive demand for newer infrastructure. This is the “application-infrastructure” cycle.
Back then, infrastructure was underdeveloped, so starting there made sense. Our goal was dual-track: collaborate with large apps that already had distribution, ecosystems, and volume, while also making it easy for early-stage developers to build.
To optimize performance, Portal supported various chains including Solana, Polygon, and Tron. But we kept circling back to one conclusion: the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) ecosystem has overwhelming network effects—developers and liquidity are concentrated there.
This created a paradox: EVM has the strongest ecosystem, but it’s too slow and expensive; other chains are faster, but fragmented. We wondered: what if a system existed that combined EVM compatibility with high performance and sub-second finality? That would be the ultimate solution for payments.
So in July this year, we accepted the acquisition of Portal by the Monad Foundation, and I began leading payments at Monad.
Many ask me: aren’t public blockchains already oversupplied? Why do we need another chain? But perhaps the question is wrong—not “why another chain,” but “have existing chains truly solved the core problems of payments?”
Ask those actually moving large volumes of capital—they’ll tell you they don’t care how novel the chain is or how good the story sounds. They care whether the unit economics work: What’s the cost per transaction? Can confirmation times meet commercial needs? Is liquidity deep enough across foreign exchange corridors? These are very real concerns.
Take sub-second finality—it sounds like a technical metric, but it translates directly into real money. If a payment takes 15 minutes to confirm, it’s commercially unusable.
But that alone isn’t enough. You also need a vast ecosystem around the payment system: stablecoin issuers, on/off-ramp providers, market makers, liquidity providers—none of these roles can be missing.
I often use this analogy: we’re in the “email moment” for money. Remember when email first emerged? It didn’t just make letter-writing faster—it enabled messages to cross the globe in seconds, transforming human communication.
I see stablecoins and blockchain the same way: humanity now possesses an unprecedented ability to move value at internet speed. We haven’t even begun to grasp what this will enable—it could mean reinventing global supply chain finance, or reducing remittance costs to zero.
But the crucial next step is seamlessly integrating this technology into YouTube, into every app on your phone. When users no longer perceive blockchain, yet enjoy internet-speed fund transfers, that’s when we truly begin.
Earning While Moving: The Evolution of Stablecoin Business Models
In July this year, the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act, and the industry landscape is subtly shifting. Circle’s once-strong moat is eroding, driven by a fundamental change in business models.
Initially, early stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle operated under a simple model: users deposit funds, issuers buy U.S. Treasuries, and all interest income goes to the issuer. That was phase one.
Now, observe newer projects like Paxos and M0—the rules have changed. These players are beginning to pass the yield generated by underlying assets directly to users and recipients. This isn’t just a profit-sharing tweak; I believe it creates a new financial primitive we’ve never seen before—a new form of money supply.
In traditional finance, money earns interest only when idle in a bank. Once it moves—during transfers, payments, or trading—it typically stops earning.
Stablecoins break this rule. Even as funds move, pay, or trade at high speed, the underlying assets continue generating yield. This opens a new possibility: not just earning while idle, but earning while in motion.
We’re still in the earliest experimental phase of this model. Some teams are going further—conducting large-scale Treasury management behind the scenes and planning to pass 100% of yields to users.
You might wonder: what do they earn? Their model relies on revenue from value-added services and products built around stablecoins—not from interest spreads.
So although it’s early, post-GENIUS Act trends are clear: every major bank and fintech firm is seriously considering how to enter this space. The future of stablecoin business models won’t stop at passive interest collection.
Beyond stablecoins, crypto-native banks have also drawn significant attention this year. Drawing from past payment experience, I see a key difference between traditional and crypto fintech.
First-gen fintech firms like Brazil’s Nubank or the U.S.’s Chime were built atop local banking infrastructures, inherently limited to domestic markets. Their services are confined by national borders.
But when you build on stablecoins and blockchain, everything changes.
You’re building on a global payment rail—an unprecedented scenario in financial history. This is transformative: you no longer need to start as a single-country fintech. From day one, you can build a new bank serving multiple countries—or even the entire world.
This is the biggest unlock. In fintech history, we’ve rarely seen such globally native starting points. This model is fostering a new wave of founders, builders, and products unbound by geography—targeting global markets from the very first line of code.
Agent Payments and the Future of High-Frequency Finance
If you ask me what excites me most over the next three to five years, it’s the convergence of AI Agents (Agentic Payments) and high-frequency finance.
A few weeks ago, we hosted a hackathon in San Francisco focused on AI and crypto. Developers flooded in—some linked DoorDash, the U.S. food delivery platform, with on-chain payments. We’re already seeing the signs. Agents aren’t constrained by human processing speed.
On high-throughput systems, agents can move funds and execute trades faster than the human brain can comprehend in real time. This isn’t just incremental speed—it’s a fundamental shift in workflows. We’re upgrading from “human efficiency” to “algorithmic efficiency,” and ultimately to “agent efficiency.”
To support this leap—from millisecond to microsecond efficiency—the underlying blockchain must be extremely performant.
Meanwhile, user account models are converging. Investment and payment accounts used to be separate, but that boundary is blurring.
This is natural product evolution—and exactly what giants like Coinbase aim for. They want to become your “Everything App”—where saving, buying crypto, trading stocks, even prediction markets—all happen in one account. This locks users into their ecosystem and keeps behavioral data in-house.
This is why infrastructure remains critical. Only by abstracting away the complexity of crypto’s base layer can DeFi trading, payments, and yield generation converge into a unified, seamless experience—without users noticing the underlying complexity.
Some of my colleagues come from high-frequency trading backgrounds, accustomed to ultra-low-latency systems on CME or stock exchanges. But what excites me isn’t continuing trading—it’s applying that rigorous engineering and algorithm-driven decision-making to everyday real-world financial workflows.
Imagine a treasurer managing multinational funds across multiple banks and currencies. Today, this requires heavy manual coordination. But in the future, with LLMs and high-performance blockchains, systems could automatically conduct large-scale algorithmic trades and capital allocation in the background—maximizing returns on every dollar.
Abstracting “high-frequency trading” capabilities and deploying them across diverse real-world workflows. This won’t remain Wall Street’s exclusive domain. Instead, algorithms will optimize every corporate dollar at unprecedented speed and scale—that’s the truly exciting frontier ahead.
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