Blockchain Works for Payments. The Problem Is Who Doesn't Want It To.
Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, said something a few weeks ago that I keep coming back to:
"Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance. Their core purpose is financialization."
She was being dismissive of the whole "web3 for gaming" and "web3 for everything" narrative, calling it intellectually lazy. And I think she's right. Not because those experiments weren't interesting, they were, but because when you strip everything away, the real problem blockchain solves is simple: sending money from one person to another, fast, cheap, and without asking a bank for permission.
That's it. Peer-to-peer transactions without middlemen. That's the thing that actually works.
All the other stuff we built on top, the NFTs, the DeFi protocols, the on-chain games, that was us pushing the technology to its limits to see what it could do. And it was fun, and it was cool, and some of it will survive. But the core of it? Payments.
So here's the question I can't stop thinking about: if blockchain payments work, and the data says they do, why isn't this the default way the world moves money?
For a while I thought the answer was UX. And honestly, that's a fair point. Wallets are confusing, seed phrases are terrifying, and asking someone to learn what a blockchain is before they can pay for coffee is a terrible onboarding experience. The UX has been bad, and that kept a lot of people away. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that UX is a symptom, not the cause. Bad UX can be fixed, and it's getting fixed. Wallets are getting better, apps are abstracting the complexity away. If UX were the only problem, we'd already be seeing mass adoption in developed countries, because the tech is there and the experience is catching up.
But we're not seeing that. And the reason, I think, is not technical at all. It's systemic.
Think about what would happen if tomorrow all transfers started happening on Solana. Or any chain, really. If peer-to-peer payments became the norm, banks would stop handling that money. And if banks stop handling money, the entire economic infrastructure that the U.S., Europe, and every developed economy is built on starts to shake.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It's just how the system works.
The global payments industry generates $2.5 trillion in revenue every year. SWIFT moves $530 billion a day through 11,000 institutions across 200 countries. Sending a bank remittance costs you 14.55% on average. That's not a fee, that's a tax on being far from your family. The World Bank says the global average for remittances is 6.49%, and they set a goal to bring it under 3%, a goal they haven't hit yet.
Governments use this system for monetary policy, interest rates, money supply, all of that depends on money flowing through intermediaries they can track and control. If you remove the intermediaries, you don't just disrupt banks. You remove the levers that governments use to manage their economies. So no, it's not that blockchain doesn't work for payments. It's that in places where the financial system is already holding up the economy, nobody in power has an incentive to replace it.
And this is where it gets interesting, because you can actually test this theory. If the real barrier is systemic and not technical, then you'd expect to see blockchain payments thriving in places where that system is weak or broken. And that's exactly what's happening.
Look at the Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, the ranking of countries by real, grassroots crypto usage. The top 10 in 2025? India, United States, Pakistan, Vietnam, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ukraine, Philippines, Russia. Eight out of ten are emerging economies. The only developed market in the list is the U.S., and when you adjust for population, it drops significantly.
Now look at where stablecoins are being used for actual payments, not trading, not speculation, but paying for things and sending money to people.
Venezuela. I'm Venezuelan, so this one is personal. The bolivar lost 70% of its value in 2025. Inflation hit 229%. Over 80% of crypto activity in Venezuela is stablecoins. 40% of peer-to-peer transactions use crypto. People are paying for groceries with USDT, about 10% of grocery payments involve crypto. When tensions with the U.S. spiked in January 2026, USDT was trading at $1.40 on P2P exchanges because the demand was that high. This is not speculation. This is people trying to survive.
Argentina. 161% inflation in 2023. The peso lost 88% of its value in four years, and then got devalued another 54% in a single day at the end of 2023. Now 61.8% of crypto transaction volume is stablecoins, way above the global average. 75% of workers who get paid in crypto prefer stablecoin salaries. The province of Mendoza accepts tax payments in stablecoins. Argentina did $93.9 billion in crypto transactions in the last year. This is the second largest volume in all of Latin America.
Sub-Saharan Africa. $205 billion in on-chain value received, growing 52% year over year. Nigeria alone did $92.1 billion. And the retail transaction share, small transactions, regular people, is 8.2%, higher than the global average of 6%. This isn't hedge funds. This is people using crypto because their banks can't serve them.
And 1.3 billion adults on this planet still don't have a bank account. 650 million of them are concentrated in just eight countries. All they need is an internet connection.
So the pattern becomes pretty clear. Blockchain payments thrive where the banking system is weak. Where the currency is unstable. Where sending money to your family costs you 15% of what you earned. Where you can't trust that the money in your account today will be worth the same thing tomorrow. And blockchain payments struggle to get adopted where the banking system is strong, not because the technology doesn't work, but because the entire economy is wired around that system. The banks, the regulators, the monetary policy tools, the tax infrastructure, all of it assumes that money flows through intermediaries.
The irony is that the U.S. and Europe see this. They know blockchain payments work. That's exactly why they're building CBDCs and passing stablecoin regulation, MiCA in Europe, stablecoin legislation in the U.S. They want the efficiency of blockchain while keeping the control of the traditional system. Which, honestly, kind of proves my point.
So if you're building in crypto and you're focused on payments, the market that needs you the most is not San Francisco. It's Lagos. It's Caracas. It's Buenos Aires. It's the places where 1.3 billion unbanked people live, where remittance fees eat 15% of every transfer, where inflation makes your savings worthless overnight.
Blockchain works for payments. It always has. The question was never whether the technology is ready. The question is whether the systems in power are willing to let it in.
In some places, they don't have a choice. The old system already failed.
Data sources: Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, World Bank Remittance Prices Q1 2025, World Bank Global Findex 2025, McKinsey 2025 Global Payments Report, IMF Stablecoin Report Dec 2025, Backpack Exchange, Bitwage, CoinLedger, Transak Global Money Movement Report 2025.