Wen Hongjun Stablecoin New Finance Series-14》Will the stablecoin network become the core underlying infrastructure of the new financial industry?

Stablecoins have made impressive progress in recent years, and the a16z report provides us with a pace of cognitive renewal. (Context: a16z's latest report "The New Stack for Global Finance: The Stablecoin Edition": The global pipeline is being rebuilt; embrace it or be eliminated!) (Background: a16z report: Stablecoins are transforming into financial infrastructure, with Asia capturing 2/3 of the global market) a16z released a report yesterday. Just as I was reading *The Economist* and *Barron’s* this weekend, both of which coincidentally reported that recent stablecoin development is being suppressed by the banking industry, with issuance stagnating and momentum lost—at a time when banks might not need to worry so much—the a16z report acted like a shot of adrenaline for the sluggish market, reigniting a glimmer of hope for us 🫡. This report is not a marketing piece for the crypto industry; it is an anatomical map of the financial system. It tells the story of how the underlying plumbing of finance is being re-laid—not patched, but completely replaced with new pipelines and systems. (Believe it or not, but I see the logos of traditional financial institutions added to this table—more and more... 😌) For the past hundred years, global finance has run on a set of old, closed pipes—SWIFT, correspondent banking networks, local central banks, and core banking systems. The characteristics of this pipeline are: expensive, slow, gated, and the gatekeepers decide whether you can enter. After stablecoins appeared, some people started building a new pipeline on the side. At first, everyone thought it was a toy, like tokens in a Tom's World arcade, not taking it seriously, until the US 🇺🇸 President Trump passed the "Clarity Act" into law, granting stablecoins legal and financial status, only then realizing something was wrong... Later, Stripe bought Bridge for $1 billion, and Mastercard bought BVNK. Now a16z has released this market map, drawing this new pipeline from the bottom layer to the application layer more and more clearly. But there is no longer just one chain; there are three: General-purpose chains run capital market transactions; payment-specific chains run financial services (Stripe built one, and Circle built one); and institutional chains run private, permissioned chains for regulated entities (Canton network) for settlement. And above these chains are the stablecoin issuers. The most important thing for them now is not marketing or offering interest, but fighting tooth and nail to get an OCC national trust charter. Because whoever gets it has the chance to connect directly to the Fed's rails, sitting at the core of the financial system and standing on equal footing with the big banks, rather than knocking on the door from the outside. In 2025 alone, it was the year the OCC received the most new bank charter applications in history, with over 20 applicants being stablecoin issuers and neobanks, including Peter Thiel's Fortress Trust 🏦. This allows traditional banks to plug in stablecoin functionality without replacing the core systems they have been running for decades. This part was discussed in "Stablecoin New Finance-10" by Financial Patrick Star; in the future, bank deposit tokens will coexist with stablecoins rather than compete or replace them. The position of a bank is not sexy, but it is the only bridge between traditional finance and new finance. (Fortunately 😌) Crypto exchanges are mutating into neobanks, neobanks are integrating crypto assets, and recently even the US stock exchange is integrating prediction markets (Polymarket). Eventually, there will be only one interface, serving both crypto-native users and ordinary people. Of course, don't forget the millions of AI Agents 🤖 and lobsters 🦞 of the future! Stablecoin payments are just the first act; the real big scene is in credit (mentioned in this report), and the subsequent full on-chain transition of Wall Street 🔥 (Financial Patrick Star has an article in the *Taiwan Banker* magazine this month, stay tuned). When the global stablecoin scale reaches trillions of dollars, these US dollars sitting in wallets need to go to work. Companies need to borrow money, protocols need liquidity, and end users want deposits, lending, wealth management, and insurance. This is an on-chain credit and capital market forming outside the traditional banking system—just like how private credit has risen from a niche to a multi-trillion-dollar market over the past decade. (Which has everyone very worried lately 🥲) Traditional credit institutions are paying attention to this. Whether they can layout or join this battlefield in time is another matter. The final layer, of course, is geopolitics. a16z puts it very bluntly: The US push for stablecoin