# Stablecoins don’t need to cross borders, nor serve agents 2/7/26 A wider range of payment businesses and banks have become willing to indulge demand for stablecoin - crypto - products. The frame you’ll hear from the smartest of these people is something like: - international payments — SWIFT, correspondent banking, FX — *are* inefficient and operationally painful - implied: in contrast to the actually-high-functioning status quo of domestic payments - if everyone *is* aligning on stablecoins as a standard, and they’re appropriately regulated - they’re a sensible solution! This is an agreeable, low-risk take across ambitious fintech operators and bank nerds. SWIFT is one of the few payment rails that actually *is* as crappy as normies presume all legacy payment rails must be. It’s also a defense of the status quo — which is what allows natural skeptics of these rails to react to new information without ceding much ground. I’ve previously insinuated, though, that “international” dramatically undersells the stablecoin opportunity, and even ignores the other SWIFT replacements that solve the same problems quite elegantly today. To make a more direct claim: the *domestic* payments opportunity is not only undersold, but likely even *bigger* than the international one. --- Domestic settlement in the US — via ACH, Fedwire/CHIPS, RTP/FedNow — accounts for more TPV (total payments volume) than all of the international payments activity on SWIFT. This is immediately counterintuitive — “domestic” is semantically a subset of “global” — but it’s a reflection of a few intuitive facts. - American people and businesses transact more with *other* American people/businesses, than with international ones. - Domestic flows This only becomes interesting in the stablecoin context if you have reason to believe that these flows — already served by rails like ACH and wire — benefit more than marginally from stablecoins. - Decoupling yield from payment - Net settlement / clearing between two trusted ledgers - Pointers to treasuries - Indivisible pools of cash - Money is more non fungible than people thinm