If China ever wants to compete with the dollar, a yuan stablecoin would be a powerful way to do it. China is the largest trading partner for many countries. A yuan stablecoin would let companies pay their Chinese partners without going through the dollar. But I don't think Beijing wants it. A stablecoin means money can leave the country without going through Chinese banks, and China's financial system is built on capital controls.

Love the WAP analogy

Back in the early 2000s, Mobile365 was looking to expand in Asia, and our investors were pushing us to move fast through M&A. Together with my co-founders, we made the mistake of listening too closely. We spent millions acquiring a company that held an ICP license to operate in China. But six months later, the Chinese government changed the rules and banned foreign companies from holding that license. Overnight, our investment was wiped out. We lost a lot of money and had to raise a down round, which led to significant dilution. Since then, I have always kept this in mind: don’t blindly follow your investors, don’t confuse pressure with urgency, and be careful because markets can shift quickly.

If we want real-time cross-border transactions between different currencies, two conditions must be met. First, domestic payment systems must be instant. They must allow money to be sent and received immediately. This is increasingly the case: Pix in Brazil, SEPA Instant in Europe, UPI in India. These systems are the first mile and the last mile of the chain. Next, these domestic systems must be able to communicate with each other in real time. SWIFT was not designed for instant settlement, and this is where stablecoins and blockchain come in. By enabling real-time value transfer, they act as a bridge between instant domestic systems that otherwise remain siloed. Here’s a simple example of a money transfer from Europe to India: 1/ Instant conversion of EUR to USDC via an on-ramp using SEPA Instant. 2/ Instant transfer of USDC from one wallet to another via blockchain. 3/ Instant conversion of USDC to INR via an off-ramp using IMPS. Otherwise, there is @TripleAHQ

Up to a 2% spread. It would be cheaper to just accept stablecoins directly.

What fintech companies expect from regulators is not indulgence. It’s clarity.

Companies should be able to access payment rails without changing their balance sheet strategy. Yet that's exactly the problem with holding stablecoins. You're now carrying a digital currency with its own accounting treatment, valuation risk, regulatory exposure and new audit requirements. It also adds security risks. In the event of a hack, there's no way to recall a transaction and no intermediary bank to block the transfer. For a company that struggles to access dollars and wants to make international transactions, holding stablecoins makes sense. But for a company with access to dollars that simply wants to pay or receive in stablecoins, holding traditional currency and transacting in stablecoins is simpler and more effective.

The first time I heard about crypto was in 2016. I was still the CEO of Thunes. On Friday evenings at work, the engineers usually played video games. But one day, I noticed they weren’t playing. They were mining. They explained Bitcoin and crypto to me, and I bought my first crypto from one of them. I immediately saw the value. At that time, our clients were facing chargeback issues. When a purchase is made with a stolen card, it's the merchant who bears the risk. The irreversibility of transactions, a fundamental feature of blockchain, solves this problem. The second point was an issue I encountered with Thunes. We were making a lot of international payments. Sometimes, when there were holidays and banks were closed, we had to pre-fund all our counterparts around the world in advance. This created a working capital problem for us. Stablecoins, on the other hand, operate every day, including weekends and public holidays. This story is what led to the creation of @TripleAHQ a few years later.

Going through two exits with Mobile 365 and TransferTo taught me a few important lessons: Our VCs played a significant role when we sold Mobile 365 to Sybase in 2006. If you approach things seriously, your investors should be able to help you succeed in your exit. They have the network and it’s in their interest. Looking at some recent exits, I have little doubt that VCs orchestrated many of them. Raising from a corporate VC can also help with a successful exit. With TransferTo, we raised our first round from Ingenico. Soon after, I wanted to raise a Series B, but they loved what we were building and didn’t want to be diluted further. Actually, they wanted to strengthen their position. After a few conversations, this led to a 100% acquisition offer. They knew us, which made the acquisition quick. The best deals happen when companies are bought, not sold. When Ingenico bought us, I initially missed that their interest wasn’t about the product or market, but our revenue level. Buyers always have a specific reason. Had we approached them, I’m not sure we would have pushed that argument and secured such a favorable deal. Earn-out structuring is crucial, especially the duration and your role. It's important to align KPIs with market conditions, company objectives, and your interests to achieve the earn-out. And don’t forget the human side. When I sold TransferTo, I had a 3-year earn-out. Transitioning from founder and CEO to managing a division was challenging. These are just my experiences, curious to hear yours.

From what I see with our customers in the Philippines, people hold both a stablecoin wallet and a peso wallet. They get funded in stablecoins, keep them as long as possible, and convert them into their local currency only when they have to make a local purchase. Why would they convert a strong currency like the US dollar into a weaker currency? As long as you can keep your money in the strongest currency and only touch the weaker, more volatile currency when you actually need to pay for something, converting early makes no sense. And now, stablecoins are starting to provide yields. Their stablecoin wallet might become a savings instrument too. The future of remittance is no remittance.

At Triple-A, we’re using @TripleAHQ to pay our contractors around the globe. We do it in 2 ways: 1. Directly in stablecoins This applies to contractors we have in Brazil, Argentina, and Bangladesh who want to be paid in stablecoins. They send us an invoice in their local currency specifying that they want to be paid in stablecoins. We then send them a payment link with the specified amount. They choose the stablecoin and blockchain they prefer. The amount is displayed, the exchange rate is locked, they enter their wallet address, and they receive the funds in real time. 2. Moving money quickly between our bank accounts We use this method when we pay contractors in their local currency. We operate globally and have bank accounts in the US, Europe, Singapore and more. But transferring money between different banks, across different geographies, can be challenging. So when we need to fund a specific bank account to pay a contractor locally, we use stablecoins to move funds quickly between our accounts. Then, we convert the stablecoins into the local currency. This is a win-win. Our contractors get paid quickly, our cash moves instantly, and we strengthen our relationship with our contractors.

In 2001, we expanded Mobile365 into the US. I made the mistake of not moving there as a co-founder. I was in Paris at the time. We operated mainly in Europe and Asia, and we merged with a company in the US after a few years to expand there. We recruited a sales team on-site, but none of the founders moved to the country to drive the operations. It was a mistake. The country is so large that it has its own rules. Our pricing model didn’t fit, and the market had certain particularities that changed the value of our offer. It worked very well everywhere else in the world, but not in the US. And even though we got feedback from the on-site team saying the model didn’t really fit, it was hard to believe and it took us too long to react, because we weren’t there. We never succeeded in growing in the US that way. It is a unique market. It’s so big, with so many specificities, that you have to be on-site as much as possible, especially when you’re at an early stage.

There is one use case that feels like a good fit for both agentic commerce and stablecoin transactions. It is machine-to-machine micropayments, like buying API calls or data for a few cents at a time. Picture an agent that handles vendor discovery, with no contract needed because every transaction settles individually in stablecoin. The merchant carries no chargeback or default risk, and the buyer pays exactly what they consume with no subscription.

Stablecoins work particularly well in markets where card penetration is lower or costs are higher. Merchants used to lose sales from customers who were ready to pay. With stablecoins, they benefit from better authorization rates, lower transaction costs compared to traditional card rails, no chargebacks, and gain access to a growing base of USDT/USDC owners.