There’s a lot of noise around stablecoins right now. Depending on who you listen to, they’re either the future of money or the missing piece that will finally “fix” payments, especially cross-border.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time digging into this space to understand where the real value lies. And while I do appreciate the technology, I’m not convinced it’s the revolution it’s often made out to be. Especially not when it comes to improving payments.
Let me explain why.
A friend of mine bought a house a couple of years ago. When I visited him for the first time, he proudly walked me through it. Room by room, he pointed out what he wanted to change. One room needed painting. Another needed bigger windows. The kitchen, in his view, was in the wrong place entirely.
Every room had a project.
But at no point did he say, “I’m going to tear the whole thing down and build a new house.”
Why? Because the house worked. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t exactly to his taste. But the fundamentals were solid.
That’s how I see payments today. And in particular, cross-border payments.
The system isn’t perfect. Far from it. But it works. And more importantly, it has been improving rapidly over the last few years. The “plumbing” has been upgraded. The “foundation” has been reinforced. We’ve effectively added high-speed fibre on top of it.
We’ve seen real progress through things like Swift GPI, real-time payment schemes, better transparency, improved compliance tooling, and growing interoperability between networks. Major players like Swift, J.P. Morgan, and initiatives like Nexus are continuously pushing the system forward.
And yet, there’s a growing narrative that we should scrap all of this and start over. Build an entirely new “house” based on stablecoins.
That’s where I struggle.
Because when you strip away the hype, there are very few things stablecoins can do that traditional rails fundamentally cannot.
Take programmable payments, for example. It’s often highlighted as a key differentiator. And yes, stablecoins can support programmability natively. But there is nothing inherently preventing traditional systems from enabling the same capabilities. It’s a design and implementation question, not a limitation of the rails themselves.
So if the features can be replicated, what are we really gaining by rebuilding everything from scratch?
To me, the real value in the stablecoin conversation isn’t the technology itself. It’s the signal. Stablecoins are telling us what the market actually wants:
That’s the takeaway.
Instead of tearing down the existing system, we should double down on renovating it. Continue improving what already works. Expand services like payee validation to reduce fraud and errors. Build on tracking capabilities like GPI to increase transparency. Push interoperability further across networks and jurisdictions.
The house is already standing. And it’s in better shape than many give it credit for.
Now is the time to keep upgrading it, not replace it entirely.
Because just like with houses, we’re never really done. There’s always something to improve, something to adapt, something to modernize. Payments are no different. As the world evolves, so will the expectations we place on how money moves.
And that’s exactly why continuous renovation will always matter more than starting from scratch.