Parsing the Signal from the Noise
When Stripe announced Tempo, its new blockchain for payments, Hacker News erupted in a 1,000-comment storm of crypto skeptics versus true believers.
The debate matters because Stripe isn't some crypto startup chasing hype: this is the company that built payment infrastructure for a generation of internet businesses, then spent years dismissing cryptocurrency's utility.
When Patrick Collison changes his mind about blockchain, it's worth understanding why.
The Case for Boring Infrastructure
Collison's explanation was notably grounded.
Bridge, Stripe's acquired stablecoin platform, serves SpaceX for "managing money in long-tail markets."
DolarApp uses it across Latin America.
An Argentinian bike importer finds stablecoins easier than traditional cross-border payments.
"Importantly," Collison emphasized, "none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit."
Crypto as boring infrastructure rather than revolutionary technology is a different framing, harder to dismiss.
Where Traditional Rails Break Down
The strongest arguments emerge at the edges of the global financial system.
Fernando from DolarApp provided concrete numbers:
The technical advantages center on settlement speed and trapped liquidity.
Traditional cross-border transfers involve multiple hops through correspondent banks, each adding delay and manual reconciliation. Stablecoins compress this into near-instant transfers, with settlement complexity pushed to the edges rather than threading through every transaction.
The Skeptic Response: Regulatory Theater
The counterargument is elegantly simple: if you need to trust a custodian anyway, why add blockchain overhead?
Stablecoins "always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases would be faster, easier, and more transparent."
Skeptics frame this as regulatory arbitrage disguised as innovation.
Stablecoins let companies "do what banks do while not being regulated like a bank," similar to how Uber avoided taxi regulations.
Some described stablecoins as "Venmo for crime", centralized systems that get zero benefit from blockchain while operating outside normal banking oversight.
The Settlement Infrastructure View
The most nuanced perspective focused on blockchain as settlement infrastructure rather than consumer payments.
International payments struggle not with final transactions but with complex inter-bank settlement. Traditional cross-border settlement is slow and manual, involving multiple counterparties tallying debts across different systems.
Crypto exchanges function as "micro-clearing houses," providing near-instant user-facing transactions while batching slower traditional settlement on the backend.
A South African receiving US salary might see funds locally within an hour via crypto rails, while underlying SWIFT settlement still takes days ... the exchange just delayed and aggregated the complexity.
Legal Hacks and Parallel Rulebooks
Perhaps the most sophisticated framing treats stablecoins as "legal hacks" around accumulated regulatory complexity.
The US has regulated itself into a corner with AML/KYC requirements that create more friction than they prevent crime. Since these regulations are politically impossible to undo directly, stablecoins provide a path for designing parallel, more permissive financial systems.
The GENIUS Act and Europe's MiCA regulation don't eliminate this arbitrage, they codify it. The blockchain label provides legal and conceptual framing necessary to build new financial infrastructure, even if the underlying technology could be replicated traditionally.
The Real Use Cases
The evidence suggests narrow but real utility: reducing friction in global finance where incumbent systems fail due to technical debt, regulatory complexity, or political dysfunction.
Use cases cluster around cross-border commerce involving countries with unstable currencies, small businesses lacking sophisticated banking relationships, and regions where correspondent banking is thin.
The blockchain isn't solving these through decentralization (hah?!) ... most stablecoin systems are highly centralized.
Instead, it provides technical and legal frameworks for building parallel payment rails under different rules than traditional banking.
The Live Experiment
Tempo represents a test: can a blockchain payment rail deliver real efficiencies while surviving regulatory backlash?
Success depends less on technical decentralization and more on Stripe's ability to thread the needle between utility and compliance.
If stablecoins truly deliver the 10x cost improvements that DolarApp claims, they'll generate enough economic value to survive regulatory pushback.
If they're just regulatory arbitrage, they'll face the same fate as other loopholes that grow too large to ignore.
The ultimate irony may be that blockchain's most important contribution to finance isn't decentralization, it's providing a socially acceptable way to rebuild payment infrastructure from scratch, routing around decades of accumulated technical and regulatory debt.
So, maybe it's just giving us permission to start over ...