Why blockchain payments are making a comeback (long article)
Meng Yan Shao Qing
As we approach the end of 2024, blockchain payments have suddenly accelerated. Many mainstream financial institutions have begun to increase their support for blockchain payments:
- On September 26, BlackRock partnered with Ethena to issue the US dollar stablecoin USDb. - On October 3, PayPal worked with EY to complete the first stablecoin commercial remittance using its self-issued PYUSD. - On October 3, VISA announced the VTAP platform to help institutions independently issue and operate stablecoins. - On October 3, SWIFT announced that it will launch digital currency and digital asset trading experiments in 2025. - On October 16, Internet payment giant Stripe announced a partnership with Paxos to support stablecoin payments.
In the past one or two years, Web3 stablecoin payment has developed rapidly and quietly. Some figures may be shocking if they are announced. More importantly, users have begun to break through the circle and are no longer just speculators. However, if Web3 payment wants to be truly applied on a large scale, it still lacks a key incubation scenario. Just like e-commerce for Internet payment, there must be a fast-growing application scenario to bring Web3 payment up.
I just returned to Australia after a month-long trip to the United States. This trip to the United States took place on the eve of the election, so I mentioned this topic to almost every friend I met. I encountered various opinions, some supporting Trump, some opposing Trump, some supporting Trump before but now opposing, and some opposing Trump before but now supporting. My overall impression is that the Australian Party has been in power for a long time, and the accumulated pain is relatively strong. The Trump Party is likely to win this time.
The main impact on the crypto industry? Good news for BTC/BTCFi.
Friends of Binance, hold on, the bull market will definitely come.
After completing the task of breaking the previous high, the bull market came to a breathing space. The infield needs to calm down, but the outfield is actually too reserved.
It is basically confirmed that the industry has entered a period of mass movement. The main characteristics of this period can be found in "The Crowd" and "Inspection Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan".
How is one positioned? You can’t stand by and point fingers, let alone stand on the opposite side, but should you stand in front and lead them? Judging from the past few cycles, this is not a good idea either. Revolution always devours its best sons and daughters. Besides, there are no guns in this industry.
Web3 will definitely subvert Web2, that's for sure, even if Jesus said it, it wouldn't work.
You should not see that Web2 is still very powerful now. A website can easily have a market value of tens of billions of dollars. In fact, Web2 is creating its own gravediggers every moment, and its underlying logic is no longer good.
Why do you say that? Do you see how the Web2 company boasts about its power? Isn’t it just that we have a lot of users (accounts), a lot of user data, and a lot of user assets? The more they promote this, the more they tell everyone that I am powerful because I possess your rights.
In the past, everyone was stupid. We would first connect to the Internet and then talk about it. Convenience comes first. We will talk about identity, rights, and assets later. As a result, seventy, eighty, or ninety super giants were created to control everything.
Nowadays, more and more people are suffering from this. Let’s ask the companies. Nowadays, any company that still has some sense of scale and autonomy is willing to hand over data to the giants and let you take it away. Enterprises have awakened. Next are small B, big C, and small C. In the end, everyone will demand independent identity, independent data, independent social relationships, independent assets, and independent rights and interests. This trend is irreversible.
Many people only look at the status quo and dismiss the power of ideas. Indeed, in some areas with extremely high concentration, such as social networks and short videos, individual users or weak Internet celebrities, big Vs, and MCN institutions have to obediently stretch their necks and let the platform ride. Go for it, but which one of them is not full of grievances? Which one is not full of anger? Every time the platform deletes posts and bans accounts, it tightens the noose for Web2 and adds fuel to the fire of Web3.
People's mentality has changed, their ideas have changed, and once this change is initiated, it is irreversible.
Right now this transition is subtle and slow because Web3 technology is not yet mature enough. This is mainly because the idea of Web3 has taken a long detour. For example, there was too much emphasis on blockchain in the past, and blockchain was used for everything. But now the problems with Web3 thinking are being rapidly corrected. Some people are beginning to face specific problems and fully use various cryptographic tools and components, including blockchain, to construct protocols and solve practical problems.In fact, this is just a layer of window paper. Once it is pierced, technology and infrastructure will develop rapidly like bamboo shoots after a rain, and the entire industry will soon take on a completely new look.
Within a few years, once users have tasted the taste of autonomous identity, autonomous data, and autonomous assets, they will not be willing to return to the Web2 world and suffer the consequences even if you whip them with a whip.
Again, this trend is irreversible.
By the way, don’t talk about supervision. Don’t think that Web3 does not support supervision. In fact, Web3 supports supervision, and Web2 has no say at all. In other words, once regulators use Web3's regulatory mechanism, they can't go back.
It's a pity that there are still too many people in Web3 staring at the little money in front of them all day long. It's a pity because the real big opportunity has already appeared.
In fact, there are two perspectives when looking at these things. The first is to look for novelty and interesting points in news events from an entertainment perspective. If it is for this purpose, then the more details, the better, because more details, higher density, more entertainment points, and more interest. The other perspective is a macro perspective, analyzing what trends these events reflect in the industry and even the world, and how these trends relate to you, mainly to guide decision-making.
From the latter perspective, the bigger the thing is, the more coarse it should be rather than fine. You should look at it with a telescope. Don't always think about decrypting and hunting for novels. Those details have nothing to do with you. Think about how the current news will be recorded in a high school history textbook 100 years from now, and then imagine what will appear on the next page of the book? This is the really important question. Only by omitting all kinds of trivial details and grasping the overall trend can we identify the pattern called "historical law". Only by identifying such patterns can we help ourselves make choices and decisions.
Take the Binance judicial settlement as an example. I read a lot of comments, and most of them provide details, interest, and emotional value. Not many people discuss this matter in a general and trend sense. That being the case, let me share some thoughts on this level. Be warned, it will definitely be boring:
1. Crypto/Web3 is equivalent to discovering a rich new continent.
2. The first group of explorers were idealists, and the second group were adventurers. After they immigrated to the New World, they quickly became kings of the mountains and established a system that was a mixture of idealism, opportunism, money worship, and plunder. This system lacks order and is full of chaos and jungle laws, but it has also become a hotbed for innovation. This stage can be called the age of exploration.
3. Binance has seized the historical opportunity, established order in chaos, and balanced complex factors such as ideals, innovation, speculation, and hype. It is undoubtedly the king of the adventure stage.
4. But this new continent has not yet produced organizations and power forms that are strong enough to compete with the traditional world. Its original set of passive confrontation methods based on a thin anonymous mechanism are now in vain.Under such circumstances, when its scale grows larger and larger, and even begins to adversely affect the balance of power in the Old Continent, the Old Continent will definitely not be able to sit idly by and ignore it, and will inevitably use its existing strength and means to intervene in the New Continent. This will push the history of the New World into the second stage, which can be called the colonial era.
5. The colonial era is an era of order construction for Web3/Crypto, but this order is not the order that is most in line with the local characteristics of the New World. Each of them combined the characteristics of new technologies and grafted onto the original system of the mother country to form an order in which a variety of colonial systems with different characteristics coexisted and competed with each other.
6. Countries that saw this were advancing the colonial process in different ways. Some countries are more proactive and are willing to go deep into the hinterland, while some countries are more passive and only want to defend their borders. This is essentially what we saw in the Binance judicial settlement. This event also marked the great acceleration of the United States' colonization process in the crypto New World. Also accelerating are Hong Kong, Singapore and other regions.
7. From the perspective of the law of development, the colonial era is definitely not the end. The process of competition between multiple systems will eventually lead to the emergence of a new order. This new order is not only more in line with the characteristics of the new technology itself, but also has outstanding competitive advantages and the ability to compete with other systems, and can have a strong negative impact on the old continent. However, it may still take a long time before the new order is created, established and successful. For quite some time, we need to focus on colonial-era strategies.
8. Binance’s settlement is a helpless move in the short term, but it may not be a bad thing in the medium to long term, because as the king of the exploration era, it successfully survived and entered the colonial era, and its strength did not damage the foundation. It has the opportunity to The new era continues to play an important role. Such good things are rare if you look through history books.
9. In the next ten years, the colonization of the Web3/Crypto world will be the main line of the industry’s story. The industry narrative will undergo fundamental changes, and the most significant innovation and wealth creation opportunities will lie on this main line. This is not to say that the order of the Age of Exploration cannot exist in the form of ruins and reserves, but its importance will gradually decline.
$LINK has skyrocketed recently. Different interpretation angles on this matter reflect different views on the nature of the market.
Some people say that a certain exchange in South Korea has finished attracting stocks and started to pull orders. This is the only reason for the price increase. People who hold this view tend to regard the market as a zero-sum trading game and are the trading faction in the currency circle.
There are also some people who believe that Chainlink is one of the few DeFi projects currently with intrinsic value, real users, a wide moat and a clear development rhythm, and its recently launched CCIP is very powerful, so the price growth is ultimately due to changes in its intrinsic value. People who hold this view believe that there is real value creation and value growth in the crypto world, and they belong to the value investing faction in the currency circle.