Original author: Chris Dixon, Founding Partner of a16z Crypto
Original translation: Luffy, Foresight News
The internet has made information free and global, but why is it still so difficult and expensive to transfer money?
The early internet promised a future where anyone could publish, build, or transact without permission. Protocols like email and the World Wide Web were open and neutral, and they sparked an explosion of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But somewhere along the way, we got off track.
Today, the global financial system resembles a patchwork of corporate networks: centralized, closed, and predatory. Behind every transaction is a complex chain of intermediaries that resembles a Rube Goldberg machine: sales, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchange dealers, bank card networks, and so on, each of which takes a piece of the pie, adds latency, and imposes various rules. These networks impose unnecessary taxes on commerce, inhibit innovation, and create high-friction bottlenecks in what should be neutral channels.
Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the dollar, are a way out, a reset, a way to bring the original vision of the internet into the realm of money.
Disruptive opportunities brought by stablecoins
The current payments system was not built for the internet, but for a world filled with intermediaries. Even today, international remittance fees can be as high as 10% (the average fee for a $200 remittance was 6.62% in September 2024). These are not just frictions, they are actually a regressive tax on some of the world’s poorest workers. The system we inherited is slow, opaque, and exclusionary, leaving billions of people underserved or excluded entirely from the global financial system.
Traditional payment methods are extremely inefficient for many businesses. Stablecoins are expected to significantly improve this situation. Business-to-business (B2B) payments from Mexico to Vietnam take 3 to 7 days to clear, cost between $14 and $150 per $1,000 transaction, and go through up to five intermediaries, each of which takes a cut. Stablecoins can bypass traditional systems such as the SWIFT network and related clearing and settlement processes, making such transactions virtually free and instant.
This isn’t just theoretical talk; it’s already happening. Companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to manage corporate funds (including repatriating funds from countries like Argentina and Nigeria where local currencies are volatile). Others, like ScaleAI, are using stablecoins to pay employees around the world faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, Stripe is the first widely used provider of cryptocurrency payments, charging a 1.5% fee at checkout, half the cost of traditional payment processors. This could significantly improve profit margins for some businesses: as Sam Broner of a16z Crypto points out, for businesses like grocery stores with extremely low margins, a 1.5% reduction in fees could potentially double net profits. And in a competitive blockchain-based market, I expect transaction fees to drop even lower.
Unlike the old financial system, which evolved in silos, stablecoins are global. They run on blockchain: an open, programmable network that anyone can build an application on, without having to negotiate with dozens of banks across borders, just plug into the network. People have recognized the advantages. In 2024, stablecoins moved $15.6 trillion in value, comparable to Visa’s transaction volume. While this number primarily represents money flows (rather than retail payments), its scale still suggests that we are on the verge of a transformation in financial infrastructure that no longer relies on piecing together 20th-century systems.
Instead, we can build entirely new, truly Internet-native things, or as Stripe calls them, “room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” where lossless value transfer is not achieved, but lossless energy transfer.
The “WhatsApp Moment” of Money
Stablecoins are our first real opportunity to do for money what email did for communications: open, instant, and borderless.
Consider the history of text messaging. Before apps like WhatsApp, it cost 30 cents to send a text across borders. Even then, it was a matter of luck whether it was delivered. Then came Internet-native instant messaging services: instant, global, free. The payments space is where text messaging was in 2008: divided by borders, weighed down by intermediaries, and artificially blocked.
Stablecoins offer a radically new alternative. Instead of cobbling together clunky, expensive, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on global blockchains. These systems are programmable and composable. Stablecoins are already slashing the cost of remittances: sending $200 from the US to Colombia costs $12.13 using traditional methods, but only $0.01 using stablecoins. The fees for converting from stablecoins to local currencies range from 5% to 0%, and prices continue to fall due to market competition.
Just as WhatsApp disrupted expensive international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are changing the way money is transferred around the world.
Supervision: From bottleneck to breakthrough
It’s easy to view regulation as an obstacle, but smart legislation is actually the key to unlocking new possibilities.
Establishing clear rules for stablecoins and crypto markets could eventually move these technologies out of the experimental field and toward widespread adoption. For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been trapped in a self-sufficient crypto-inner-circulation economy. Not because the tools are useless, but because regulators make it extremely difficult to integrate them into the traditional financial system.
That’s changing. Policymakers are now actively crafting rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in a way that preserves U.S. competitiveness, protects consumers, and allows innovation to flourish. Thoughtful regulation can protect against bad actors while providing clear direction for compliant participants to build upon. In fact, an upcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for broader adoption and integration into the global financial system.
Build public products that benefit the public
Traditional finance is built on private, closed networks. But the Internet showed us the power of open protocols (like TCP/IP and email) to drive global coordination and innovation.
Blockchains are the native financial layer of the internet. They combine the composability of public protocols with the economic power of private enterprise, with proven neutrality, auditability, and programmability. Add stablecoins to this foundation, and you get something we’ve never really had: an open monetary infrastructure.
Think of it like a public highway system where private companies can still build vehicles, run businesses, and create roadside attractions, but the roads themselves are neutral and open to everyone.
Blockchain networks and stablecoins do more than just cut fees, they give rise to new categories of software:
Programmable payments between machines: Imagine a marketplace driven by AI agents that automatically facilitates transactions of computer resources and other services.
Micropayments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with simple rules, and then having a “smart” wallet issue payments.
Transparent payments with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track government spending.
Global commerce without the need for intermediaries: Imagine international transactions being completed instantly at a very low cost; in fact, this is no longer just a fantasy, it is happening now.
The era of blockchain networks and stablecoins has arrived: technology, market demand, and political will are converging. A stablecoin bill could be on the table this year, and regulators are weighing the framework to ultimately match risk with appropriate regulation. Just as early internet startups thrived once they knew they wouldn’t be shut down by telecom companies or copyright lawyers, cryptocurrencies are ready to cross over from financial experiments to infrastructure pillars, and stablecoins will lead the charge.
We don’t have to patch the old system, we can build a new, better one.
