Tommy Li, co-founder of Native, on why the infrastructure cycle is bigger than the price cycle: The first crypto wave sold access. You open an account, you own Bitcoin, and you have a wallet. This was effective for individual investors and the early-adopter wave but failed to solve a major pain point for Finance teams, which was that none of it fits in the workflow where a business transacts.
This disparity creates the structural difference of the current cycle. It’s the operational side of companies now pushing into crypto rather than the treasury bets and speculative allocation of the past cycle. And here are the reasons in numbers behind the previous system.
The cost of moving money across the world remains on average 6.36 percent of the money transferred. Just 35 percent of global cross-border retail payments and 55 percent of wholesale and remittance payments settle within one hour, falling short of a target of 75 percent on a global basis. These figures are not outriders. They represent the default cost of international trade and have barely budged in decades, in spite of decades of fintech enthusiasm.
“Cross-border money movement is still slower, more expensive, and less transparent than domestic payments,” was mentioned by the Co-Founder of Native, a payments and liquidity infrastructure provider serving institutions, fintech companies, and enterprises. “Recent policy progress has not yet translated into strong end-user improvement at the global level.”
The stablecoin business case is already showing up in data
This friction is precisely what stablecoins aim to address. What’s also, in many ways, unique from other crypto narratives is that this use case is now on the measurable side. Of organizations currently using stablecoins, 41 percent cite their cost savings at 10 percent or more, almost entirely due to cross-border B2B payments. In B2B stablecoin payments are estimated to total approximately $226B annually and make up about 60 percent of total stablecoin payment volume.
Another comparison is Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot. It now runs on 9 blockchains and has run $7B annualized in settlement run rate. That’s not a pilot in name only; that’s a major payments network testing digital asset rails within its own system.
It is important to state the obvious. Payment flows based on stablecoins have been projected at $390B in 2025. While that sounds enormous in isolation, consider that figure in relation to existing payment infrastructure. Including on-ramps, off-ramps, and even smaller-ticket payments, the equation changes significantly.
What businesses actually need from crypto infrastructure
Li defines the problem operationally. Companies don’t need crypto exposure, they need payment settlement, counterparty settlement, treasury, execution of large trades, and spending via card rails, without requiring every department to be versed in the functioning of a blockchain.
This gap in the market is very real. A crypto card fills part of this: merchants get fiat; users draw from digital asset holdings; the transaction fits into the familiar acceptance network. Stripe is already pushing this further with stablecoin accounts that support both fiat and crypto rails and a card offering that enables a conversion of the user’s stablecoin balance to local fiat at the point of sale.
Native addresses the same workflow problem but takes an institution-first approach, providing OTC trading, crypto card, and treasury management functionality within one infrastructure layer. It is based on the assumption that it is not reasonable for one institution to have five different providers in order to execute trading, settlement, treasury exposure management, and spending.
“A company shouldn’t need five providers to do what should be one workflow,” Li says. “The next adoption layer is usability.”
Regulation as infrastructure
One key element influencing this spread geographically is regulation. Hong Kong approved fiat-referencing stablecoin issuance in August 2025. The SFC and FSTB also have forthcoming virtual asset dealer and custodian regimes in place. These elements are not merely checkbox exercises; they actually influence how finance teams, banks, and enterprise clients determine whether a digital asset platform can be sufficiently trusted to exist within a financial workflow.
Native is in the process of obtaining its SFC licenses and is building itself around Hong Kong regulations. The reasoning is as basic as this: if compliance infrastructure spans KYC and AML checks, transaction monitoring, and audit trails, then there is no discussion about the product to institutional clients.
“Most businesses I talk to aren’t worried about whether stablecoins work,” Li points out. “They want to know whose license backs the platform and who picks up the phone if a payment goes wrong.”
Volatility, which people consider an obstacle, is actually less of an issue than people claim. A large part of the price risk is being offset by stablecoins and a simple treasury policy will take care of the rest. The actual difficult issue is usability. Requiring finance departments to consider chains, gas prices, wallet addresses, and bridge risk every time they make an amount move isn’t a product.
What embedding looks like
Perhaps the most insightful clue of this trajectory is the actions of traditional financial players themselves. Hong Kong’s virtual bank Mox, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered, launched regulated crypto trading within its banking app, facilitated by HashKey Exchange, positioning it firmly as part of a combined banking and investing journey.
And it is a very important framing. Those companies that are constructing stable positions in digital asset infrastructure are not asking users to onboard to a new system but are taking away the system entirely.
“Digital assets will become more useful as they become less visible to the end user,” Li states. “The user may not care which chain is involved, but they will care that the payment arrived faster and the funds were easier to use.”