Crypto & onchain finance
The interesting part of crypto stopped being speculative and started being boring.
The thesis
Stablecoins won the argument by being useful in places where correspondent banking is slow, expensive, or absent. That is a payments business with a float attached, and float businesses are won on distribution and regulatory posture, not on cryptography.
The value migrates to whoever sits closest to the end user: the payroll product, the marketplace payout, the remittance app. Chains become a settlement substrate that nobody talks about, which is what success looks like for infrastructure.
Who gets disintermediated
Correspondent banking spreads and card-network cross-border fees are the obvious targets. Less obvious: the middleware layer of onramps and custody APIs, which is being absorbed upward by regulated issuers and downward by the apps themselves.
The bear case
Float yield is a rate-cycle artefact. Compress rates and a chunk of stablecoin economics disappears, leaving a fee business competing with instant bank rails that regulators are actively subsidising.
What we'd watch
- Stablecoin volume that is payments, not exchange collateral rotation
- Bank-issued versus non-bank issuer share
- Instant domestic rail adoption in the corridors stablecoins serve
- Whether custody and onramp margins compress toward zero
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