LATEST: 📊 Visa says payments volume across its stablecoin-linked card programs has grown nearly 200% YoY, with ~17% of that volume now coming from business and commercial card programs.

We set out to understand why many stablecoin cards charge FX fees as high as your bank. Card currencies, explained: what the networks charge across borders, how much settling in USD really costs, and who's fixing it.

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the more i think about stablecoin adoption, the less convinced i am that the end state is better ramps, faster cash-outs or more crypto cards. i think the real end state is much more radical: you stop needing to leave crypto in the first place. today, on/off-ramps, cards and banking infrastructure are incredibly important because we are still connecting two financial systems that largely operate separately. the flow still looks something like this: local currency → on-ramp → stablecoin → onchain activity → off-ramp → bank/card/merchant settlement a user receives local currency, converts it into a stablecoin, moves value onchain, and eventually someone converts it back into local currency so it can actually be spent. and every time that happens, the transaction re-enters a regulatory perimeter built primarily around fiat. bank → requirements payment processor → requirements card issuer → requirements @Visa / @Mastercard → another layer of requirements on/off-ramp → KYC + AML + sanctions + transaction monitoring that architecture makes those intermediaries enormously powerful compliance chokepoints. but the more interesting question is: what happens when crypto adoption becomes deep enough that users don't need to exit the system after every transaction? imagine this instead: salary in USDT/USDC ↓ merchant ↓ supplier ↓ contractor ↓ treasury or even more simply: user → merchant → supplier → contractor → treasury same asset. value stays onchain. the merchant doesn't immediately cash out. the supplier doesn't immediately cash out. the company keeps part of its treasury onchain and uses those balances for payments, working capital or yield. at that point, the stablecoin is no longer primarily an asset that needs to be converted into "real money" before it becomes useful. it becomes part of the monetary infrastructure itself. we can already see early versions of this behavior in countries such as venezuela, where stablecoins are used not only as a savings mechanism but for payments, commercial settlement and transfers between individuals and businesses. i've spent years working across latin america, and i think this distinction matters enormously. today we tend to measure crypto adoption by how effectively crypto connects to the traditional financial system: → how good is the off-ramp? → can i attach a card? → how quickly can i settle into a bank? but mature adoption might eventually be measured by exactly the opposite question: how often does the user actually need to leave crypto at all? that doesn't mean fiat ramps disappear. you still need a bridge when value enters from pesos, reais, dollars or euros and you still need another one when someone wants to exit. but their role changes. today: fiat → crypto → fiat → crypto → fiat mature stablecoin economy: fiat → crypto → crypto → crypto → crypto 　　　　　　　　　　　↓ 　　　　　　　　fiat when needed ramps move from the center of the transaction architecture toward the edges, and from a regulatory perspective, this is where things get much more interesting. because removing a bank or a card network from a transaction does not remove compliance. it changes where compliance has to live. if economic activity increasingly happens onchain, regulators cannot rely exclusively on banks and payment companies as the places where identity, sanctions screening, source of funds and transaction monitoring happen. the compliance perimeter starts moving closer to the infrastructure itself: →wallet screening → onchain transaction monitoring → blockchain analytics → stablecoin issuer controls → risk scoring → identity + account attribution → programmable transaction limits → sanctions enforcement → persistent audit trails audit trails that follow an account across products rather than having to be reconstructed afterwards by a bank. @FATFNews is already beginning to grapple with this problem: its work on stablecoins and unhosted wallets recognizes that widespread stablecoin usage can allow value to circulate and goods to be purchased without transactions necessarily passing through the traditional fiat intermediaries on which much of the existing AML framework historically relied. to me, that is one of the most important regulatory questions of the next decade. not: will crypto become less regulated? i don't think it will. if anything, economically significant crypto networks will probably attract substantially more regulatory attention. the real question is: where will the regulatory control points sit? today: banks ↓ issuers ↓ acquirers ↓ payment processors ↓ ramps tomorrow, an increasing part of that perimeter may sit around the infrastructure that controls, observes or facilitates digital asset movement: VASPs → stablecoin issuers → wallets → transaction monitoring → blockchain analytics → programmable compliance so my thesis isn't that on/off-ramps are going away. it's that successful stablecoin adoption eventually makes us depend on them less. ramps become edge infrastructure. compliance becomes increasingly crypto-native infrastructure. and there is something almost paradoxical about that outcome. after more than a decade of building banking integrations, card programs and fiat bridges to make crypto usable, the mature version of the technology may move us closer to the original idea behind digital cash: one party → value → another party without a traditional financial institution having to intermediate every single transaction. not an unregulated financial system. a differently intermediated one. and, eventually, a differently regulated one.

LATAM, you up? 👀 #DeeFinch is loading... ✔︎ Brazil ✔︎ Mexico ✔︎ Colombia ✔︎ Peru ✔︎ Chile ✔︎ Argentina Six countries. One very busy bird. 🐦 We’re coming soon. #Payments #Stablecoins #Fintech #USDT