Private blockchains are like private jets - they have their place, and for some people they make sense. But most businesses will do just fine flying economy until the numbers in the spreadsheet justify going private.

We need more crypto challengers. Institutions and enterprises aren’t going to deliver on a silver platter the mainstream adoption many projects are hoping for. To be clear, I still believe crypto will take over institutional and enterprise finance in the long run. But I don’t see it happening through incumbents simply integrating crypto rails, no matter how much sense that may make over time. It’s like Revolut. Any bank could have offered cheap FX at interbank rates, and it was an obvious win for so many customers. But retail currency exchange was a highly lucrative, stable business. It worked just fine. Messing with it meant internal friction, stepping on other people’s toes, and creating a lot of unnecessary hassle for no obvious gain. Pushing for change from within was an almost impossible, thankless task. It took an outsider with no lucrative FX business to protect to turn cheap FX into a competitive advantage. That external push triggered an avalanche across the industry, and the rest is history. We need challengers like that with crypto. TradFi works just fine the way it is. But an incumbent’s soft cushion can be a challenger’s opportunity. Crypto rails can make financial services easier, cheaper, leaner, more transparent, and more capable. But that change won’t come from within, where every innovation threatens real humans down the corridor and looks like a risky business case overall. For some time now, I’ve been looking for examples of such challengers, even small ones, using crypto to gain a competitive edge in real-world markets. I’ll probably share some of their stories eventually. In the meantime, if any examples come to mind, pls DM me or share them in the comments.

Reminds me of my uni days, when I learned about a Polish power plant running on software written in Turbo Pascal (for real - a uni colleague of mine was the son of one of the guys maintaining it).

History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme in the most beautiful ways. :)

Some people (speaking for a friend, of course) are actually putting a lot of effort into enabling their agents to interact with their bank accounts, despite banks’ efforts to prevent it. Maybe that’s what’s being observed here, rather than some Skynet takeover? Did anyone ask?

lfg!

"This is real money. This is not a pilot anymore." That line from Sanchit Mall is my favourite highlight from our panel at @stblcnsummit Singapore last week. I'd felt the same shift while preparing for it: the tone has changed, even compared with last year. Stablecoins are no longer an experiment on the edge of finance. They're becoming part of its infrastructure, and every company that moves money will have to work out what that means for it. It isn't simple, though. As Wayne Huang put it in his opening keynote, payment is much more than moving value. Fiat payments come bundled with disputes and chargebacks, fraud protection, credit, reconciliation, tax refunds, escrow, letters of credit and supply-chain finance, and stablecoin payments include very little of that today. Naojiro Hisada made the same point from the buyer's side. For a company like Rakuten, one of the key criteria is "whether the stablecoin payment for B2B is better than the other payment methods... and also the additional benefit on top of just the stablecoin." But things are moving fast. Mai Kaneko was candid that tokenised deposits, today, stop at the edge of a single bank. Multi-bank networks like DCJPY are what change that, and in Japan that's one to two years away, not ten. Tushar Gulhane went further. Two years ago, on the same stage, he described pilots where most companies dropped out simply because they couldn't access stablecoins. Today, he says, access is solved; the hurdle is getting digital currencies into treasury policy. Without that, you get pilots, not scale. (And his call to finally get rid of 60- and 90-day payment terms deserves a panel of its own.) I left very happy with the panel, and a little unsatisfied. Two-minute answers only scratch the surface. Each of these topics deserves an hour: treasury policy, multi-bank deposit networks, agent trust, what a corporate buyer actually needs. I hope to pick up some of these threads in longer conversations. Thank you, Tushar Gulhane (SAP), Mai Kaneko (DCP), Sanchit Mall (Visa) and Naojiro Hisada (Rakuten), for a candid conversation full of insights that will keep me busy digging deeper for a while. Also big thanks to @partyactionppl for having me as moderator again. And if you're reading this: keep an eye on the next Stable Summit, in London next month (13 November 2026). It's one of the best signal-to-noise events in this space right now, and I'm honoured to have been a small part of it.