Six years of deep cultivation in the stablecoin wave, how bold is his vision for the future of payments?

What kind of transformation will stablecoins bring? This question has been troubling the entire financial industry since Facebook’s Libra project surfaced in 2019. Raj Parekh’s career trajectory is precisely the best epitome of this six-year experimental journey — witnessing the dilemmas of traditional finance at Visa, founding Portal to connect applications and infrastructure, and finally joining Monad to reshape the payment layer.

No one understands the logic behind stablecoins better than him.

Why 2019 Was the Beginning of Everything

When Libra emerged suddenly, the reaction from the traditional finance circle was subtle and complex. Before that, major institutions’ attitudes toward cryptocurrencies were either indifferent or dismissive — toys for geeks, gambling halls for speculators. But Libra changed everything.

Visa became one of the earliest public partners. The symbolic significance of this move far exceeded its own value — it announced a turning point, signaling that traditional financial giants finally acknowledged that if they don’t participate, there will be no seat for them in the future.

In the first half of his time at Visa, Raj focused on payment security — helping banks cope with data breaches, vulnerabilities, and hacking attacks. But after getting involved with blockchain, he realized this was a fundamentally different thing. No technology could move value as astonishingly fast, continuously flowing across the globe as blockchain does.

This also revealed Visa’s problem: it still relies on the banking system, Mainframe, and wire transfers at the core. But what about blockchain? It is open-source, real-time, borderless.

The approach of Visa’s Crypto team was not to aggressively push the technology but to ask questions first: Why can’t settlement be done in seconds? Why can’t funds flow 24/7? These are the real problems that stablecoins should solve.

From Visa’s Settlement Innovation to Portal’s Infrastructure Exploration

The breakthrough in settlement efficiency was found. Visa decided to use USDC as a new settlement mechanism, directly integrating with Ethereum. It sounds crazy, but the logic behind it is very pragmatic.

Crypto.com is a major client of Visa, converting crypto assets into fiat daily via SWIFT or ACH wire transfers. The entire process takes T+2 or longer, forcing Crypto.com to lock up huge guarantees with banks to prevent default risks caused by settlement delays. This “dead money” should generate yield but just sits idle.

So why not settle directly with USDC? After collaborating with Anchorage Digital, the first test transaction was completed — USDC settled within seconds. At that moment, Raj realized stablecoins are not just theoretical but practically feasible.

But the pain that followed was straightforward: the infrastructure is still too immature.

This is how Portal came about. Raj’s idea was simple and elegant — build a developer platform that allows any fintech company to integrate stablecoin payments as easily as accessing an API. It’s not about fame or profit for entrepreneurs but a belief: to create an open-source payment system.

Portal serves traditional remittance giants like WorldRemit and emerging neobanks. But as the business deepened, a paradox emerged: the EVM ecosystem is the strongest (developers, liquidity are here), but it’s too slow and expensive; other chains have better performance but fragmented ecosystems.

What does a payment system need? Compatibility with EVM standards, sub-second confirmation, high performance. When Monad Foundation extended an olive branch, Raj knew he had found the answer.

The Transformation of Stablecoin Business Models

Since the signing of the GENUIS Act in the US in July, the rules of the stablecoin game have fundamentally changed.

In the past, the business logic of Tether and Circle was straightforward — users deposit money, issuers buy US Treasuries, and all interest goes to them. This was the first phase of profit-making.

But now, new projects like Paxos and M0 are rewriting the script. They directly pass the interest from underlying assets to users. This is not just a profit-sharing adjustment but an unprecedented creation of a new financial primitive.

In traditional banks, only idle money earns interest; once transferred or paid, funds usually do not generate yield during circulation. But stablecoins break this limitation — circulating funds also earn interest. This opens up a whole new realm of imagination.

The future trend is already clear: large banks and fintech companies are seriously considering how to join in. The business model of stablecoins will not stop at simply earning interest but will revolve around building value-added services and ecosystems around stablecoins — that’s the real long-term value.

The Future of Global Finance and Agent Payments

Crypto financial technology is fundamentally different from traditional fintech. Nubank, Chime, built on local banking infrastructure, serve within strict geographical boundaries. But products based on stablecoins and blockchain operate on a global payment track.

This is disruptive: from day one, you can build a bank targeting a global user base without being constrained by geographical borders. This has never happened in financial history.

Looking three to five years ahead, Raj is most excited about the combination of AI Agents and high-frequency finance. When algorithm-driven agents move funds and execute trades in milliseconds or microseconds, workflows will upgrade from “human efficiency” to “agent efficiency.”

Imagine a CFO managing cross-border funds involving multiple banks and complex FX pairs. In the future, LLMs combined with high-performance public chains could automatically perform large-scale algorithmic trading and fund allocation behind the scenes, optimizing every cent. The capability of “high-frequency trading” will no longer be exclusive to Wall Street but will be widely applied in corporate finance.

What is the prerequisite for this transformation? The underlying blockchain performance must be sufficiently powerful. The payment system must be able to handle it.

The “Email Moment” in Financial History

Raj uses a metaphor: we are in the “email moment” of money. When email appeared, it was not just about faster letter writing but about transmitting information across the globe in seconds, fundamentally changing human communication. Stablecoins are the same — they empower humans to transfer value at internet speeds.

The key question is not “Are existing chains good enough?” but “Do they truly solve the core payment problems?” What do large-scale fund movers care about? Not how grand the story is, but cold, hard economics — what is the transaction cost? Can confirmation times meet business needs? How deep is the liquidity?

Sub-second finality may seem like a technical metric, but behind it is real money. A payment with 15-minute confirmation time is practically unusable in business.

This is also why infrastructure remains crucial. Truly abstracting crypto components, enabling DeFi transactions, payments, and yield farming to be integrated into a unified experience — making users hardly feel the complexity — this is the future. When funds circulate at internet speed but users are unaware of it, a new financial era truly begins.