Six years into the stablecoin wave, he envisions the future of payments taking shape

Interview: Jack, Kaori

Editor: Sleepy.txt

This year is destined to be recorded in financial history as the “Year of Stablecoins,” and perhaps the current buzz is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, there have been six years of undercurrents surging.

In 2019, when Facebook’s stablecoin project Libra shocked the traditional financial world like a deep-water bomb, Raj Parekh was at the heart of the storm at Visa.

As the head of Visa’s cryptocurrency division, Raj personally experienced the industry’s psychological shift from cautious observation to active participation. It was a moment of non-consensus.

At that time, arrogance in traditional finance coexisted with blockchain’s immaturity. Raj’s experience at Visa painfully revealed the industry’s invisible ceiling—not because financial institutions didn’t want innovation, but because the infrastructure at the time simply couldn’t support “global payments.”

Driven by this pain point, he founded Portal Finance, aiming to build better middleware for crypto payments. However, after serving many clients, he realized that no matter how much the application layer was optimized, the performance bottleneck at the underlying layer remained the ceiling.

Eventually, the Portal team was acquired by Monad Foundation, with Raj leading the payment ecosystem.

In our view, he is the ideal candidate who understands both the application logic of stablecoins and the underlying mechanics of crypto payments—no one is more suited to review this efficiency experiment.

Recently, we spoke with Raj about the development of stablecoins over the past few years. We need to clarify what is driving the current craze behind stablecoins—is it regulatory boundaries, the willingness of giants to finally participate, or more pragmatic profit and efficiency considerations.

More importantly, a new industry consensus is forming—stablecoins are not just assets in the crypto world but may become the infrastructure for the next generation of clearing and fund flows.

But questions also arise: how long will this enthusiasm last? Which narratives will be disproved, and which will settle into long-term structures? Raj’s perspective is especially valuable because he is not an onlooker but has been fighting in the water all along.

In Raj’s account, he describes the development of stablecoins as the “email moment” of money—a future where fund flows are as cheap and instant as sending messages. But he also admits he hasn’t fully figured out what this will spawn.

Below is Raj’s self-narration, published after editing by Beating:

Prioritizing problems over technology

If I had to find a starting point for all this, I think it was 2019.

At that time, I was at Visa, and the atmosphere in the financial industry was very delicate. Facebook suddenly launched the Libra stablecoin project. Before that, most traditional financial institutions viewed cryptocurrencies as either a geek’s toy or a speculative tool. But Libra was different; it made everyone realize that if they didn’t get on this bandwagon, they might have no place in the future.

Visa was among the earliest to be publicly listed as a Libra project partner. Libra was very special at the time—it was an early, large-scale, and very ambitious attempt, bringing many different companies together around blockchain and crypto for the first time.

Although the final outcome didn’t unfold as everyone initially expected, it was a watershed event that made many traditional institutions take crypto seriously for the first time, rather than dismissing it as a fringe experiment.

Of course, this also brought enormous regulatory pressure. Later, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and others withdrew in October 2019.

But after Libra, not only Visa but also Mastercard and other Libra members began to systematize their crypto teams. On one hand, to better manage partnerships and networks; on the other, to develop products and elevate them into a more comprehensive strategy.

My career actually started at the intersection of cybersecurity and payments. During the first half of my time at Visa, I mainly built a security platform to help banks understand and respond to data breaches, vulnerabilities, and hacking—centered on risk management.

It was during this process that I began to understand blockchain from a payments and fintech perspective, viewing it as an open-source payment system. The most shocking thing was that I had never seen a technology that could move value so rapidly, 24/7 globally.

At the same time, I was very aware that Visa’s underlying infrastructure still depended on the banking system, relying on Mainframe, wire transfers, and other relatively old technologies.

For me, open-source systems that can also “transport value” are very attractive. My intuition at the time was simple: the infrastructure that systems like Visa depend on in the future is likely to be gradually rewritten by blockchain-like systems.

After the Visa Crypto team was established, we didn’t rush to promote the technology. This team was one of the smartest and most hands-on builders I’ve seen. They understand traditional finance and payment systems deeply, and also have great respect and understanding of the crypto ecosystem.

At its core, the crypto world has a strong “community attribute.” If you want to succeed here, it’s very hard not to understand and integrate into it.

Visa is a payment network, and we must focus heavily on how to empower our partners—such as payment service providers, banks, fintech companies—and identify where efficiency issues exist in cross-border settlement processes.

So our approach wasn’t to push a certain technology onto Visa first, but rather to identify real problems within Visa, then see if blockchain could solve some of them.

Looking at the settlement chain, a very straightforward question emerges: since fund flows are T+1, T+2, why not achieve “second-level settlement”? If it could be done instantly, what benefits would it bring to treasury and finance teams? For example, if a bank closes at 5 pm, what if the treasurer could initiate settlement at night? Or, if settlement normally doesn’t happen on weekends, what if it could be done seven days a week?

This is why Visa later turned to USDC. We decided to use it as a new settlement mechanism within the Visa system, truly integrating it into the existing Visa infrastructure. Many people might not understand why Visa would test settlement on Ethereum. Back in 2020 and 2021, that sounded crazy.

For example, Crypto.com is a major client of Visa. In traditional settlement processes, Crypto.com has to sell their crypto assets daily, convert to fiat, and then transfer via SWIFT or ACH to Visa.

This process is very painful—first, the time lag, since SWIFT isn’t real-time, with T+2 or longer delays. To avoid settlement default, Crypto.com must lock a large amount of collateral in the bank, known as “pre-funding.”

This money could have been earning interest through business, but instead, it just sits idle on the books, to cover the slow settlement cycle. We thought, since Crypto.com’s business is built on USDC, why not settle directly with USDC?

So we partnered with Anchorage Digital, a federally licensed digital asset bank. We initiated the first test transaction on Ethereum. When that USDC moved from Crypto.com’s address to Anchorage’s address at Visa, and settled within seconds, the feeling was incredible.

Infrastructure disconnect

My experience with stablecoin settlement at Visa painfully revealed one thing: the industry infrastructure is too immature.

I always see payments and fund flows as a “completely abstracted experience.” For example, when you buy coffee at a café, the user just swipes a card, completes the transaction, and gets the coffee; the merchant receives the money—it’s that simple. The user doesn’t know how many steps happen behind the scenes: communicating with the bank, interacting with the network, confirming the transaction, settling, and clearing—all should be hidden, invisible to the user.

That’s why I see blockchain the same way. It is indeed a good settlement technology, but ultimately, it should be abstracted through infrastructure and application-layer services, so users don’t need to understand the complexity of the chain.

This was the reason I decided to leave Visa and start Portal—to create a developer-facing platform that allows any fintech company to integrate stablecoin payments as easily as calling an API.

Honestly, I never imagined Portal would be acquired. To me, it was more about a sense of mission—I saw “building an open-source payment system” as a lifelong pursuit.

I believed that if I could make on-chain transactions more user-friendly and enable open-source systems to be applied in everyday scenarios—even in a small role—that would still be a huge opportunity.

Our clients range from traditional remittance giants like WorldRemit to many emerging neobanks. But as the business deepened, we fell into a strange cycle.

Some might ask, why not focus on building applications instead of infrastructure? After all, many now complain that “there’s too much infrastructure, not enough applications.” I think this is a cyclical issue.

Generally, better infrastructure comes first, which then spurs new applications; as new applications emerge, they in turn drive the next round of infrastructure development. This is the “application-infrastructure” cycle.

At that time, we saw that the infrastructure layer was still immature, so it made sense to focus on infrastructure first. Our goal was to run two parallel tracks: one to collaborate with large applications that already have distribution, ecosystems, and transaction volume; the other to make it very easy for early-stage companies and developers to start building.

To pursue performance, Portal supported various chains like Solana, Polygon, Tron, etc. But after all the effort, the conclusion was always the same: the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) ecosystem’s network effects are too strong—developers are here, liquidity is here.

This creates a paradox: the strongest ecosystem is EVM, but it’s too slow and expensive; other chains are faster but fragmented. We thought, if one day, a system could be both EVM-compatible and achieve high performance with sub-second confirmation, that would be the ultimate answer for payments.

So in July this year, we accepted Monad Foundation’s acquisition of Portal, and I started leading the payment business at Monad.

Many ask me, isn’t the public chain space already saturated? Why do we need new chains? The question might be misphrased—it’s not “why do we need new chains,” but rather “have existing chains truly solved the core problems of payments?”

Ask those who handle large-scale fund transfers—they’ll tell you, what matters most isn’t how new or story-rich the chain is, but whether the unit economics make sense. What’s the cost per transaction? Can confirmation times meet business needs? Is liquidity deep enough across different forex corridors? These are very practical issues.

For example, second-level finality sounds like a technical metric, but behind it is real money. If a payment takes 15 minutes to confirm, it’s unusable in business.

But that alone isn’t enough—you also need to build a large ecosystem around the payment system: stablecoin issuers, deposit and withdrawal service providers, market makers, liquidity providers—these roles are indispensable.

I often use an analogy: we are in the email moment of money. Remember the scene when email first appeared? It wasn’t just about making writing faster; it allowed information to be transmitted across the globe in seconds, fundamentally changing human communication.

I see stablecoins and blockchain the same way. This is an unprecedented capability in human civilization—moving value at internet speed. We haven’t even fully figured out what it will spawn; it could reshape global supply chain finance, or bring remittance costs to zero.

But the most critical next step is how this technology can be seamlessly integrated into YouTube, into every daily app on your phone. When users don’t feel the presence of blockchain but enjoy internet-speed fund flows—that’s when we truly begin.

Living in circulation, the evolution of stablecoin business models

In July this year, the US signed the “GENIUS Act,” and industry dynamics are subtly shifting. The competitive advantage once held by Circle is beginning to fade, and the core driver behind this is a fundamental change in business models.

In the early days, stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle had very straightforward business logic: users deposit money, the issuer uses it to buy US Treasuries, and all interest income belongs to the issuer. That was the first phase.

But now, if you look at new projects like Paxos or M0, you’ll see the game has changed. These new players are directly passing on the interest income generated by underlying assets to users and recipients. This isn’t just profit-sharing; I believe it creates a new primitive of finance—a new form of money supply.

In traditional finance, money deposited in banks only earns interest if it remains idle. Once you start transferring or paying, the money usually doesn’t generate interest during circulation.

Stablecoins break this limitation: even as funds are moving, paying, and trading at high speed, the underlying assets continue to generate interest. This opens up a new possibility—funds are not just static but can also earn while circulating.

Of course, we are still in the very early experimental stage of this new mode. I see some teams attempting more aggressive approaches—managing large-scale US Treasuries behind the scenes, even planning to pass 100% of interest to users.

You might ask, what do they earn? Their logic is to profit from other value-added products and services built around stablecoins, not from interest rate spreads.

So, although it’s just beginning, after the GENIUS Act, the trend is very clear: every major bank and fintech company is seriously considering how to join this game. The future of stablecoin business models will not stop at simple savings and interest.

Besides stablecoins, crypto-native banks are also gaining significant attention this year. Combining my past experience in payments, I see a core difference between traditional fintech and crypto fintech.

The first-generation fintech companies, like Nubank in Brazil or Chime in the US, are fundamentally built on local banking infrastructure. They rely on the local banking system. This inevitably limits their service scope to local users.

But when you build products based on stablecoins and blockchain, the situation changes completely.

You are essentially building on a global payment track—a change never seen before in financial history. This transformation is disruptive: you no longer need to be a fintech company for a single country. From day one, you can build a global bank targeting multiple countries or even the entire world.

This is the biggest unlock I see. In the entire history of fintech, we’ve rarely seen such a level of global startup from the outset. This model is spawning a new wave of founders, builders, and products—no longer constrained by geography. From the very first line of code, their goal is the global market.

Agent Payments and the future of high-frequency finance

If you ask me what excites me most in the next three to five years, it’s the combination of AI Agents (Agentic Payments) and high-frequency finance.

A few weeks ago, we hosted a hackathon in San Francisco themed around AI and crypto. Many developers emerged, such as a project integrating US food delivery platform DoorDash with on-chain payments. We are already seeing this trend: Agents are no longer limited by human processing speed.

In high-throughput systems, the speed at which agents move funds and complete transactions can be so fast that even the human brain might not keep up in real time. This is not just about being faster; it’s a fundamental workflow shift: we are upgrading from “human efficiency” to “algorithm efficiency,” ultimately heading toward “Agent efficiency.”

To support this leap from milliseconds to microseconds, the underlying blockchain performance must be sufficiently robust.

Meanwhile, user account paradigms are also merging. In the past, your investment account and payment account were separate, but now that boundary is blurring.

This is a natural evolution at the product level and something giants like Coinbase are eager to do. They want to become your “Everything App”—saving money, buying tokens, stocks, even participating in prediction markets—all within one account. This way, they can lock users into their ecosystem, not giving up deposits and behavioral data easily.

This is also why infrastructure remains crucial. Only by truly abstracting the components of the crypto layer can DeFi trading, payments, and earning yields be integrated into a seamless experience, making users hardly aware of the underlying complexity.

Some of my colleagues have deep backgrounds in high-frequency trading, used to executing large-scale trades with ultra-low latency systems on CME or stock exchanges. But I am excited not just to continue trading, but to transfer this rigorous engineering capability and algorithm-driven decision-making into everyday real-world finance workflows.

Imagine a CFO managing cross-border funds, handling large amounts dispersed across different banks and involving multiple forex pairs. In the past, this required extensive manual coordination. But in the future, with LLMs working alongside high-performance public blockchains, the system could automatically perform large-scale algorithmic trading and fund allocation behind the scenes, earning more yield for the entire operation.

Abstracting “high-frequency trading” capabilities and applying them to various real-world workflows—this is no longer the monopoly of Wall Street. It’s about enabling algorithms to optimize every penny for enterprises at incredible speed and scale—that’s the new category worth truly looking forward to.