Crypto & onchain finance

Setup

Stablecoin payouts to marketplace sellers across three corridors where correspondent banking took four business days and cost north of three percent all-in. The buyer was the marketplace's finance team, not the seller, and the sale was made on settlement time and reconciliation load.

What happened

Volume compounded steadily and unglamorously, because the seller's alternative was genuinely bad. The chain was picked on fees and confirmation time and was never mentioned in a sales conversation. Revenue came from a payout fee of roughly 80 basis points, not from float, which turned out to be the reason the business kept working when rates moved.

Where it stands

Two of the three corridors now compete against instant domestic rails that clear in seconds for a flat local fee, and the rail is losing one of them on price outright. The third corridor, where no domestic instant scheme exists and the local banking system is the bottleneck, carries the large majority of gross profit on a minority of volume. Aggregate volume still rises every month, which is exactly why the aggregate chart is misleading.

Legacy settlement time replaced

4 days → minutes

Take rate

~80 bps

Gross profit from one corridor

majority

Corridor economics decide the outcome. Ask for volume, take rate and gross profit split by corridor, and assume any corridor facing a live instant-payments scheme is on a clock.

Setup

Reserve income on short-dated government paper was the dominant revenue line — comfortably more than three quarters of it — and was presented to investors alongside a total-value-locked chart that combined genuine payment volume with collateral being rotated between the issuer's own venues.

What happened

Rate compression removed a large share of revenue within three quarters, with no change in product, customers or headcount. When the volume chart was finally separated, real third-party payment flow turned out to be a clear minority of the number that had been quoted in the raise, and a meaningful slice of the remainder was the same collateral cycling repeatedly through a handful of addresses.

Where it stands

What is left is a fee business competing against bank-issued and consortium alternatives under a regulatory regime that now imposes reserve composition and disclosure requirements the original model never priced. That is a different company from the one that was funded, with a different cost base and a lower ceiling.

Revenue from reserve income

>75%

Time for rate compression to bite

3 quarters

Genuine third-party flow in TVL

minority

Split payment volume from collateral rotation before you take any volume chart seriously, and treat float yield as cyclical revenue that should be valued at a fraction of fee revenue.