Vuong Nguyen Hi! I'm the Founder of Meteor Dreams, a technology consulting company in Boston, MA. I write about building products and companies in stablecoins, AI/ML, blockchain, fintech, and more →
Stablecoins hit $46T in annual volume and banks are responding by putting their own money on-chain. The real battle isn't between public and private rails. It's about who controls the bridges between them.
The last crypto winter felt like building in a pit while the world pretended blockchain didn't exist. This winter feels different. Stablecoins are processing over $1.3 trillion monthly. The energy is quieter, but more honest. Builders are solving problems that matter: payments, trust, liquidity, stability.
Companies are racing to add AI everywhere. But most are strapping rockets to donkeys and calling it innovation. Real transformation requires rebuilding systems, not just adding layers on top.
In the global payment system, small senders pay the highest percentage in fees. A mother in Lagos loses 8% sending $10 for school lunch, while a bank wiring $10 million pays less than 0.1%. Stablecoins may finally level the playing field.
Stablecoin payments look simple, but the reality is a three-layer sandwich where banks, issuers, and exchangers each take a bite. Add FX spreads, and users lose billions each year. The fix is direct tokenized deposits and on-chain FX markets that compress costs from dollars to cents.
Fintech's future isn't being shaped in the U.S. or Europe. It's emerging in Lagos, Ho Chi Minh City, and Buenos Aires, where stablecoins and digital rails solve survival challenges.
In 2017, blockchain was supposed to destroy banks. By 2025, JPMorgan runs $1B daily on-chain, BlackRock tokenizes treasuries, and Circle IPOs at $20B. The irony is sharp, but the lesson is clearer: the revolution did not fail, we just misunderstood what people actually needed.
Stablecoins promised safety, but without compliant yield, savers in inflation-hit markets lose value. CTO lessons on why DeFi lending survived, CeFi failed, and where safe yield might emerge.
Stablecoins are hailed as the future of money, but adoption in emerging markets is blocked by broken off-ramps. From Nigeria to Argentina to the Philippines, the bottleneck isn’t wallets, it’s cash access.
AI agents already want to transact with one another, but current financial rails block them. Stablecoins may solve storage, but intelligence layers will unlock real-time, global payments.