Editor's Note: In many crypto narratives, stablecoins are often seen as supporting characters. They may not be flashy or offer massive returns, but they persist behind almost all transactions and payments. This conversation shifts the focus to the true stage of stablecoins.

Zach Abrams has a unique background. He has experience in private equity and fintech companies, participated in the productization of USDC at Coinbase, later founded Bridge to turn stablecoins into API-based payment infrastructure, and ultimately sold the company to Stripe in 2023. He witnessed the journey of stablecoins from skepticism to gradual acceptance by fintech, corporations, and governments.

There are three key points worth noting in the interview.

First, the engineering challenges of payments.

While the narrative around stablecoins is often grand, when it comes to payment scenarios, it boils down to mundane problems like "how to pay thousands of people simultaneously." Bridge encountered challenges such as sending tens of thousands of aid payments on Stellar, taking eighteen hours to process a portion, accompanied by numerous failures. They also faced the cost of preloading SOL amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars to onboard wallets for millions of users on Solana.

The real challenge is to keep the system stable under these real-world loads.

Second, Tempo's positioning.

Under Stripe's guidance, a chain called Tempo, an EVM-compatible blockchain, is being built, emphasizing high throughput, sub-second finality, and privacy. It is a chain tailored for payment scenarios, not for trading or speculation. Stripe does not see it as a private chain but aims to turn it into shared public infrastructure.

Third, the market structure of stablecoins.

Zach's assessment is that in the future, there will be a very small number of branded stablecoins, such as USDT and USDC, which will continue to exist based on liquidity and the network effects of trading pairs.

However, at the same time, many companies will launch their own internal stablecoins for fund transfers, settlement, and revenue distribution.

Imagine the internal fund flows of Walmart or Robinhood, which may not necessarily rely on USDC but could completely use their own issued "company dollars." In this scenario, the role of a clearinghouse would become crucial, as it could perform end-of-day reconciliations between different stablecoins.

The discussion also extends to possibilities in the next five to ten years, such as whether local currency stablecoins will fill the gap left by the US dollar, whether AI agents will become the largest stablecoin users, and whether banks in the new system will gradually retreat to purely a clearing layer. These questions do not have answers today, but they are gradually becoming part of our reality.

The greatest value of this episode lies in providing a pragmatic perspective. Stablecoins do not need to be exaggerated or hyped; their significance comes from the most mundane fund transfers. Whether it's Stripe or Bridge, what they are doing is enabling these funds to reach their destinations faster, cheaper, and more reliably. It is this seemingly ordinary goal that may determine the shape of the future payment system.