Interview by: Jack, Kaori
Edited by: Sleepy.txt
This year is destined to be recorded in financial history as the "Year Zero of Stablecoins," and the current clamor may just be the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a six-year-long undercurrent of activity.
In 2019, when Facebook's stablecoin project Libra shocked the traditional financial world like a depth charge, Raj Parekh was at the center of the storm at Visa.
As head of Visa's cryptocurrency division, Raj witnessed firsthand the traditional financial giant's psychological shift from observation to entry—a moment devoid of consensus.
At that time, the arrogance of traditional finance coexisted with the immaturity of blockchain. Raj's experience at Visa painfully exposed him to the industry's invisible ceiling. It wasn't that financial institutions didn't want to innovate, but rather that the infrastructure at the time simply couldn't support "global payments."
With this pain point in mind, he founded Portal Finance, attempting to build a more user-friendly middleware for crypto payments. However, after serving a large number of clients, he discovered that no matter how much the application layer was optimized, the underlying performance bottleneck remained the ceiling.
Ultimately, the Portal team was acquired by the Monad Foundation, and Raj took the helm of the payment ecosystem.
In our view, he is the perfect candidate who has both a deep understanding of the business logic of stablecoin application layers and a profound knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of crypto payments. No one is more suitable than him to review this experiment on efficiency.
Not long ago, we talked with Raj about the development of stablecoins in recent years. We need to clarify what is driving the current popularity of stablecoins: is it the feasible boundaries set by regulators, the fact that giants are finally willing to enter the market, or a more realistic calculation of profits and efficiency?
More importantly, a new industry consensus is forming—stablecoins are not just assets in the crypto world, but may become the next generation of infrastructure for clearing and fund transfers.
But questions arise: how long will this fervor last? Which narratives will be disproven, and which will solidify into long-term structures? Raj's perspective is valuable because he is not merely an observer on the shore, but constantly battling in the water.
In Raj's narrative, he calls the development of stablecoins the "email moment" of money—a future where the flow of funds is as cheap and instant as sending a message. But he also admits that he hasn't really figured out what this will bring about.
The following is Raj's own account, compiled and published by Beating:
Problems first, not technology first
If I had to pinpoint a starting point for all of this, I would say it was 2019.
At that time, I was at Visa, and the atmosphere in the entire financial industry was very delicate. Facebook suddenly launched its Libra stablecoin project. Before that, most traditional financial institutions viewed cryptocurrencies either as toys for geeks or as speculative tools. But Libra was different; it made everyone realize that if they didn't get on the game, there might not be a place for them in the future.
Visa was one of the first members publicly listed as partners in the Libra project. Libra was very special at the time; it was a very early, large-scale, and ambitious attempt that brought together many different companies for the first time around the topic of blockchain and encryption.
Although the final result did not materialize as everyone had initially expected, it was indeed a very important watershed event, making many traditional institutions truly treat encryption as an issue that needed to be taken seriously for the first time, rather than a fringe experiment.
Of course, this was followed by enormous regulatory pressure, and Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and other companies withdrew one after another in October 2019.
But after Libra, not only Visa, but also Mastercard and other Libra members began to formalize their crypto teams more systematically. This was partly to better manage partners and relationship networks, and partly to truly develop the product and elevate it to a more holistic strategy.
My career actually started at the intersection of cybersecurity and payments. During my first half at Visa, I mainly focused on building a security platform to help banks understand and respond to data breaches, vulnerability exploits, and hacker attacks; the core of my work was risk management.
It was during this process that I began to understand blockchain from the perspective of payments and fintech, and I've always viewed it as an open-source payment system. The most striking thing is that I've never seen a technology that allows value to circulate so rapidly, 24/7, globally.
At the same time, I also clearly see that Visa's underlying infrastructure still relies on the banking system and relatively old technology stacks such as Mainframe and wire transfer.
For me, open-source systems that can also "transfer value" are very attractive. My intuition at the time was simple: the infrastructure on which systems like Visa rely in the future will likely be gradually rewritten by systems like blockchain.
After the Visa Crypto team was formed, we didn't rush to sell our technology. This team is one of the smartest and most hands-on builders I've ever met. They understand both traditional finance and traditional payment systems, and they also have a deep respect and understanding for the crypto ecosystem.
The crypto world has a strong "community attribute" at its core. If you want to succeed here, it's hard not to understand and integrate into it.
Visa is a payments network, and we must focus a lot of our energy on how to empower our partners, such as payment service providers, banks, and fintech companies, and on what efficiency issues exist in our cross-border settlement processes.
Therefore, our approach is not to force a certain technology onto Visa, but rather to first identify the real problems within Visa and then see if blockchain can solve them in certain aspects.
If we focus on the settlement process, a very intuitive question arises: since fund transfers are typically T+1 or T+2, why can't we achieve "second-level settlement"? If we could achieve second-level settlement, what benefits would it bring to the finance and treasury teams? For example, banks close at 5 PM; what if the treasury team could initiate settlements even in the evening? Furthermore, what if settlements were not normally conducted on weekends, but could be made available seven days a week?
This is why Visa later switched to USDC; we decided to make it a new settlement mechanism within the Visa system, truly integrating it into Visa's existing system. Many people may not understand why Visa would conduct settlement tests on Ethereum. Back in 2020 and 2021, it sounded crazy.
For example, Crypto.com is a major Visa customer. In the traditional settlement process, Crypto.com sells its crypto assets every day, converts them into fiat currency, and then wire transfers them to Visa via SWIFT or ACH.
This process is extremely painful. First, there's the time factor; SWIFT isn't real-time, there's a T+2 or even longer time lag. To ensure settlements don't default, Crypto.com has to deposit a large sum of money in a bank, which is known as "pre-capitalization."
This money could have been used to generate revenue through business operations, but now it's just sitting in the account, stuck dealing with the slow settlement cycle. We thought, since Crypto.com's business is built on USDC, why can't we settle directly in USDC?
So we went to Anchorage Digital, a federally licensed digital asset bank. We initiated our first test transaction on Ethereum. It was an amazing feeling when the USDC was transferred from Crypto.com's address to Visa's address at Anchorage and settled within seconds.
Infrastructure Faults
My experience with stablecoin settlements at Visa made me painfully realize one thing: the industry infrastructure is far too immature.
I've always viewed payment and fund transfer as a "completely abstracted experience." For example, when you go to a coffee shop to buy coffee, the user simply swipes their card, completes the transaction, and receives the coffee; the merchant receives the money—it's that simple. The user has no idea how many steps are involved underneath: communicating with your bank, interacting with the network, confirming the transaction, completing settlement… all of these should be completely hidden and invisible to the user.
So I view blockchain in the same way. It is indeed a good settlement technology, but ultimately it should be abstracted through infrastructure and application layer services so that users do not need to understand the complexity of the chain.
This is why I decided to leave Visa and found Portal, to create a platform for developers that allows any Fintech company to integrate stablecoin payments as easily as using an API.
To be honest, I never imagined that Portal would be acquired. For me, it was more of a mission; I saw "building an open-source payment system" as the cause I wanted to dedicate my life to.
At the time, I felt that if I could make on-chain transactions easier to use and enable open-source systems to truly be implemented in everyday use cases, even if I only played a small role, it 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 vicious cycle.
Some might ask, why not develop applications instead of infrastructure? After all, many people are now complaining that "too much infrastructure has been built, and there aren't enough applications." I think this is actually a matter of cycles.
Generally speaking, better infrastructure comes first, which then fosters new applications; as new applications emerge, they in turn create the next wave of new infrastructure. This is the "application-infrastructure" cycle.
At the time, we saw that the infrastructure layer was not mature enough, so I felt that starting with infrastructure was a more logical approach. Our goal was to pursue two parallel paths: on the one hand, to cooperate with large applications that already had distribution, ecosystems, and transaction volume; on the other hand, to make it very easy for early-stage companies and developers to get started.
In pursuit of performance, Portal supports various chains such as Solana, Polygon, and Tron. But no matter how you look at it, you always end up at the same conclusion: the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has such a strong ecosystem network effect that developers and liquidity are all here.
This creates a paradox: the EVM ecosystem is the strongest, but it's too slow and too expensive; other chains are fast, but their ecosystems are fragmented. We thought at the time that if one day a system could emerge that is both compatible with the EVM standard and can achieve high performance and sub-second confirmation, that would be the ultimate answer to payments.
So in July of this year, we accepted Monad Foundation's acquisition of Portal, and I also began to be in charge of payments at Monad.
Many people ask me, "Aren't there already too many public blockchains? Why do we need new ones?" This question might be flawed. It's not "Why do we need new blockchains?" but rather, "Have existing blockchains truly solved the core problems of payments?"
If you ask those who are actually involved in large-scale fund transfers, they'll tell you that what they care about most isn't how new the blockchain is or how well the story is told, but whether the unit economic model is feasible. What is the cost of each transaction? Can the confirmation time meet business needs? Is the liquidity deep enough between different forex corridors? These are all very real questions.
For example, sub-second finality might sound like a technical metric, but it represents real financial value. If a payment takes 15 minutes to confirm, it's commercially unusable.
But that's not enough. You also need to build a huge ecosystem around the payment system, with stablecoin issuers, deposit and withdrawal service providers, market makers, and liquidity providers all playing indispensable roles.
I often use the analogy that we are in the era of email, the currency of the world. Remember when email first appeared? It not only made writing letters faster, but it allowed information to travel to the other side of the world in seconds, thus completely changing the way humans communicate.
I view stablecoins and blockchain in the same way; they represent an unprecedented ability in human history to transfer value at internet speed. We haven't even fully grasped what it will bring yet; it could mean a reshaping of global supply chain finance, or even zero remittance costs.
But the most crucial next step is how to seamlessly integrate this technology into YouTube and every everyday app on your phone. When users can enjoy the speed of internet-based money transfers without even realizing the existence of blockchain, that's when we'll truly begin.
Earning interest through circulation: The evolution of stablecoin business models
In July of this year, the United States signed the GENIUS Act, and the industry landscape is undergoing subtle changes. The competitive advantage that Circle once built is beginning to fade, and the core driving force behind this is a fundamental shift in its business model.
In the past, early stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle had a very simple and straightforward business logic: users deposited money, they used that money to buy US Treasury bonds, and all the interest income generated went to the issuer. That was the rule of the game in the first phase.
But now, if you look at new projects like Paxos and M0, you'll find the rules of the game have changed. These new players are starting to directly transfer the interest income generated by their underlying assets to users and recipients. This isn't just an adjustment in profit distribution; I think it actually creates a new financial primitive we've never seen before—a new form of money supply.
In the traditional financial world, money placed in a bank only earns interest when it remains untouched. Once you start transferring or making payments, the money typically does not accrue interest during its circulation.
However, stablecoins break this limitation. Even as funds circulate, are used for payments, and are traded at high speeds, the underlying assets continue to generate interest. This opens up a completely new possibility: no longer just passively accruing interest, but accruing interest even as the funds are circulating.
Of course, we are still in the very early experimental stages of this new model. I have also seen some teams trying more radical approaches, managing large amounts of US Treasury bonds behind the scenes, and even planning to pass on 100% of the interest to users.
You might ask, then how do they make money? Their logic is to profit from other value-added products and services built around stablecoins, rather than from interest rate spreads.
Therefore, although this is just the beginning, the trend is already very clear after the GENIUS Act: every major bank and every major fintech company is seriously considering how to join this game. The future business model of stablecoins will certainly not stop at simply depositing money and earning interest.
Besides stablecoins, new crypto banks have also received a lot of attention this year. Based on my past experience in payments, I believe there is a core difference between traditional Fintech and crypto Fintech.
The first generation of fintech companies, such as Nubank in Brazil or Chime in the United States, were essentially built on the local banking infrastructure of their respective markets. They relied on the local banking system at their core. This inevitably led to a limitation on their target audience, essentially restricting them to serving only local users.
But when you build a product based on stablecoins and blockchain, the situation changes completely.
You're essentially building your product on a global payments track, something we've never seen before in financial history. This brings about disruptive change; you no longer need to be a Fintech company operating in a single country. You can build a new type of global bank from day one, serving users in multiple countries, even globally.
This is what I believe is the biggest breakthrough: in the entire history of fintech, we have almost never seen a startup of this scale that is global. This model is giving rise to a whole new generation of founders, builders, and products who are no longer limited by geofences and whose goal is the global market from the very first line of code they write.
The Future of Agent Payments and High-Frequency Finance
If you ask me what excites me most in the next three to five years, it would definitely be the combination of AI Agents (Agentic Payments) and High Frequency Finance.
A few weeks ago, we hosted a hackathon in San Francisco focusing on the integration of AI and cryptocurrency. A large number of developers participated, including one project that combined the US food delivery platform DoorDash with on-chain payments. We are beginning to see this trend, where agents are no longer limited by human processing speed.
On high-throughput systems, agents can move funds and complete transactions so quickly that the human brain may not be able to process them in real time. This is not just a matter of being faster, but a fundamental shift in workflow: we are upgrading from "human efficiency" to "algorithmic efficiency," and ultimately moving towards "agent efficiency."
To support this leap in efficiency from milliseconds to microseconds, the underlying blockchain performance must be powerful enough.
At the same time, user account structures are merging. In the past, your investment account and payment account were separate, but now that boundary is blurring.
This is actually a natural choice at the product level, and it's also what giants like Coinbase most want to do. They want to become your "Everything App," where you can save money, buy cryptocurrency, buy stocks, and even participate in prediction markets—all within a single account. This way, they can keep users firmly locked in their ecosystem, without handing over their savings and behavioral data to others.
This is precisely why infrastructure remains crucial. Only by truly abstracting away the underlying components of cryptography can DeFi transactions, payments, and yield earning be seamlessly integrated into a unified experience, with users barely perceiving the underlying complexity.
Some of my colleagues have extensive high-frequency trading backgrounds and are used to conducting large-scale transactions using extremely low-latency systems on the CME or stock exchanges. But what excites me is not continuing to trade, but rather migrating this rigorous engineering capability and algorithm-driven decision-making mechanism to real-world daily financial workflows.
Imagine a finance manager overseeing multinational funds, handling vast sums spread across various banks and multiple currency pairs. Previously, this required extensive manual coordination. However, in the future, with LLM (Limited Lending Machine) coupled with a high-performance public blockchain, the system can automate large-scale algorithmic trading and fund allocation behind the scenes, thereby increasing the profitability of the entire fund management operation.
Abstracting the capabilities of "high-frequency trading" and migrating them to more diverse real-world workflows—this is no longer the exclusive domain of Wall Street. Instead, it represents a new category that truly promises the future: algorithms optimizing every penny of a company's money at extremely high speed and scale.
