Episode 6 of The Future of Finance is OPEN features Raj Parekh, head of stablecoins and payments at Monad and co-host of The Money Code podcast. A mutual friend, Nika Naghavi, introduced us, and I have to say it was one of the most unusual introductions I’ve ever received. Over the following three months, every single person who I mentioned Raj’s name to did the same thing: their whole demeanour softened. People kept describing his kindness. There’s an old line that nice guys finish last. Raj is fairly convincing evidence to the contrary, and I still don’t know his secret. His background explains why he sees the plumbing so clearly. At Visa, he founded the team that launched a stablecoin settlement system to eliminate the risk of weekend settlement, back in the early 2020s, before most of the industry was paying attention. He has since moved to the frontier of what stablecoins can actually do. This conversation is about what happens when money finally moves at internet speed, and whether we use that shift to include more people or simply to rearrange the deck chairs. The Humans Are the Bottleneck Now The most striking thing Raj said comes early. For years, the constraint on money movement was technology. You settled in batches, once a day, because that was all the rails could do. That constraint is gone. We can now settle 24/7. And yet the money still doesn’t always move, because the bottleneck has shifted from the machines to us. Think about what eight-to-five banking hours do to a treasury team. You clock out on Friday, and until Monday you are stuck. You cannot move money. So you come back to a weekend’s worth of backed-up transactions, which is why, as Raj puts it, Monday mornings are the most stressful part of a treasurer’s week. The technology to end that stress already exists. The mental model has not caught up. Organisations built their entire operations around the assumption that money sleeps, and unlearning that assumption is slow human work, not an engineering problem. Raj went on to explain that the anti-money-laundering requirements are largely the same whether you move value over SWIFT or over a blockchain. You still need to know the sender, the beneficiary, the amount, and the purpose. However, a public ledger actually gives regulators more visibility, not less. Anyone can audit the chain from anywhere in the world. With a traditional wire, only you and the recipient ever see the transaction. The industry we were told to fear on compliance grounds may turn out to be the more transparent one. What Happens to Correspondent Banking Correspondent banking is the invisible scaffolding of cross-border payments, and it is under real pressure. The largest banks hold the biggest networks of these bilateral relationships. Everyone smaller either piggybacks on a JP Morgan or builds the relationships one painful market at a time. If you can instead send money directly from New York to London to Singapore without a correspondent bank in the middle, you strip an enormous amount of inefficiency out of the system. Markets are efficient in the long run, and Raj’s mental model is simple: that inefficiency does not survive. However, there is one part that will hold on longer. Foreign exchange depends on liquidity, and liquidity has to be built market by market, day after day. As Raj says, liquidity is not something you can vibe code. Until stablecoin FX liquidity is treated on equal terms with the correspondent banking version, that bridge remains. I pushed back here, because the incumbents are not sitting still. JP Morgan invests around 18 billion dollars a year and has built serious blockchain infrastructure. SWIFT’s own ledger went live the day before we recorded. My analogy is the shift from landlines to mobile. BT and AT&T did not disappear when mobile arrived. They got bigger, because they were the ones funding the new networks, even as Vodafone and Verizon emerged from nowhere to take real share. Raj’s version is speedboats and cruise ships. The incumbents are cruise ships that have finally pointed their compass in the right direction and will eventually arrive, while an early-stage startup can be a speedboat and race ahead. What the incumbents own is distribution. What they often lack is speed. The winners will be decided by who executes, not by who is oldest. The Business Model Flip The US GENIUS Act is quietly reshaping how stablecoins make money, moving from issuer-controlled interest toward something more user-centric. Raj’s explanation of why banks are lukewarm is clear. A bank’s lifeblood is deposits it can lend against many times over. You cannot lend against a stablecoin in the same way. You simply hold the reserves in treasury bills and earn the Fed funds rate, which is not a thrilling business for a bank. For a fintech or a neobank, the picture inverts entirely. Instead of negotiating an interest-sharing deal with a banking-as-a-service provider, you can earn yield directly from the reserves, built into the protocol, and pass it to your users. And you can launch that product globally almost immediately. What took Revolut a decade to build, Raj argues, you can now switch on in a fraction of the time. The business model of paying interest is old. What has changed is how the interest is generated and where it can reach. Whether regulators let this continue is the open question. Yield has always been a powerful way to acquire deposits, which is why Coinbase, Robinhood, and Revolut lean on it. Raj points to Figure’s SEC-regulated, yield-bearing stablecoin as a company staying a step ahead of the law rather than betting against it. The era of paying yield simply for the sake of it may be closing. The era of doing it properly, inside securities law, is the opportunity. A Dollar Account Anywhere in the World Here is where the conversation touches the thing I care about most. A traditional checking account is denominated in your local currency. A stablecoin gives you a dollar account anywhere on earth. For someone in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or Nigeria, that is not an incremental improvement. It means their local bank is no longer competing against another local bank for a peso or naira account. It is competing against a stronger currency that also plugs into the hundreds of millions of merchants who already accept Visa and Mastercard. Raj is careful about what stays hard to dislodge. Visa is nearly a 75-year-old company, and its merchant acceptance network took decades to compound. You do not disrupt that in a year or two. The checking account, however, no longer carries that kind of moat. This is what he calls a dollar export mechanism, and it cuts both ways. Freelancers and small businesses in emerging markets increasingly choose to hold dollars rather than convert to their own currency, which drains pressure onto the sovereign currency of their own country. The technology makes payments cheaper and faster, and at the same time it carries a geopolitical charge that will take years to play out. Raj’s pointed out that you cannot vibe code regulated financial services. As software gets cheaper to build, the regulatory layer becomes the hard, valuable part, because you still need licences in every market. And the stakes are not abstract. Take remittances. A migrant sending 100 dollars home every couple of weeks looks trivial on its own. For the receiving country, those flows are GDP. That is the hospital bill paid, the groceries bought, the restaurant kept open. Make money movement more efficient in those corridors and the second- and third-order effects reach the real economy of entire nations. Know Your Agent Agentic commerce dominated the conversation, as it seems to dominate every stablecoin event now. When an AI agent transacts, our familiar KYC framework starts to bend, and the industry has begun talking about knowing your agent rather than only your customer. Raj’s baseline is refreshingly practical. If an agent acts on my behalf, then I am the user, I am the one who has been verified, and I am on the hook when it makes a mistake. What makes agents different is that they are hyper-rational economic actors. They are not reading headlines or swayed by an advertisement for someone’s deposit yield. They take a task and find the path of least resistance to complete it, which increasingly means very small, very frequent payments for things like compute or an API call. This is exactly what the card networks were never built for. In his Visa days, Raj told us, the only company granted an exception for sub-dollar transactions was Apple, for the iTunes Store. When a transaction is worth micro-cents, you cannot ask Visa to process a two-cent refund that costs twenty cents to dispute. The existing system simply has no answer for value this small moving this often. The guardrails, encouragingly, are mundane. You set budgets and transaction limits, the same controls you already understand. Raj has gone further and given his agents their own dedicated card with a deliberately low credit limit, ring fenced from the rest of his money. It is a long way from the nightmare of an agent buying a Lamborghini and apologising afterwards. This is where x402 comes in, the standard from Coinbase and Cloudflare that Raj has helped shape through the Monad Foundation. The 402 status code has sat dormant in the internet’s plumbing since the beginning, a payment field that was never wired up. Companies see millions of these requests and have never been able to monetise them. x402 is the attempt to finally build the coordination layer, over cards or stablecoins, that lets a machine pay another machine. One of Raj’s favourite experiments lets you send a request with your address and a sub-penny stablecoin payment, and a company ships you a T-shirt automatically, anywhere in the world. CoinDesk reported around 28,000 dollars in daily volume in March, most of it testing rather than real flows, a
