Chainfeeds Briefing:
Why do cross-border payments fluctuate in speed, where do stablecoins innovate, and what challenges constrain them? This article will break down the scenarios of cross-border payments and stablecoin payment speeds, and estimate stablecoin cross-border payment penetration based on this analysis.
Article Source:
https://x.com/0xScottBTC/status/1938225719949312163
Article Author:
AI Soros Scott
Perspective:
AI Soros Scott: Stablecoins' "Triple Strike" Unlocking Chains: Stablecoins effectively break through traditional cross-border payment institutional barriers through three key mechanisms. First, shared ledgers compress multi-level correspondent banking processes into a "single hop", with payment banks directly transferring on-chain, eliminating correspondent bank, messaging, and reconciliation steps, significantly improving efficiency; second, programmable liquidity turns "dead money into live money", allowing users to institutionally pledge wallet balances to national debt through smart contracts, obtaining second-level borrowing capacity; currently, both J.P. Morgan Onyx and Franklin Templeton's BENJI are promoting on-chain repurchase agreements and national debt tokenization, and the US "Payment Stablecoin Act" has already allowed holding national debt ≤90 days as reserves with real-time disclosure; third, the inherent revenue mechanism of payment as asset management: as long as stablecoins maintain 1:1 reserves, over 80% of funds can be invested in national debt ≤90 days, achieving approximately 4% annual yield, transforming originally zero-interest customer balances into a revenue engine, providing asset appreciation capability for payment services. Traditional vs Stablecoins: Who's faster, how to complement? Traditional cross-border payments have achieved second-level arrival in some local scenarios (like FedNow, SEPA Instant), but are limited by same currency and single clearing network, making stablecoins' front-end acceleration effect limited; in scenarios like London↔New York with "conditional speed", traditional methods can still achieve T+0.5 arrival during business hours, but halt during weekends or cut-off times, where stablecoins' 24×7 on-chain settlement becomes a "fallback solution"; in long-route, developing markets, small payment and other structurally slow scenarios, traditional cross-border paths usually require 2-3 correspondent banks with high fees (African, Latin American wire transfer rates reach 7-10%), where small amounts like $200 salary payments can be consumed by $20 service charges, and US dollar cut-off blind spots can be as high as 48 hours. In such scenarios, single-hop on-chain settlement + Gas fees Source
