Empowering universal access to financial services. Your money, your rules.
Copyright© 2025 Anodos Labs Inc. - All Rights Reserved
Empowering universal access to financial services. Your money, your rules.
Copyright© 2025 Anodos Labs Inc. - All Rights Reserved
Articles
21 Nov, 2025
Anodos
Team
6 mins read
Transformation of any kind requires a lot of time. The global financial system is undergoing a fundamental reshaping, as for decades, traditional finance operated within established boundaries such as centralized institutions, siloed networks, and intermediary-dependent processes. Today, a decentralized type of finance is challenging these conventions, offering transparent, accessible, and efficient alternatives. Yet, the most significant opportunity doesn't lie in choosing one over the other, but rather in building the bridges that connect them.
At Anodos, we truly believe the future of finance isn't about traditional institutions versus blockchain innovation. The only way forward lies in creating interoperable money in the form of the financial infrastructure that seamlessly combines the trust and stability of established systems with the speed, transparency, and accessibility of onchain finance.
Let's talk about what actually happens when you send money internationally.
Nowadays, SWIFT processes $150 trillion annually, roughly 1.5 times global GDP, through more than 11,500 financial institutions. It's secure, standardized, and globally accepted. Moreover, it’s also a messaging system, and not a payment one. SWIFT tells banks how to move money, but it doesn't move it.
The actual settlement happens through a Byzantine network of correspondent banking relationships, where banks maintain accounts with each other in multiple currencies across multiple jurisdictions. Each hop adds time, cost, and counterparty risk.
Are you curious what the average cost is to send $200 internationally? The UN’s SDG target is to reduce remittance transaction costs to less than 3% by 2030. According to their 2025 report, “overall remittance costs remained high … the global average cost of sending $200 was 6.7% in 2024.” Meanwhile, stablecoin transactions settle in seconds for fractions of a cent. That's much more than just a marginal improvement. Here we face a different paradigm entirely.
The integration between traditional and decentralized finance reached unprecedented levels recently, marking what experts call a pivotal turning point in the evolution of the global crypto ecosystems. This isn't speculation about what might happen anymore, as major financial institutions are already implementing blockchain solutions on a large scale.
Visa and Mastercard have expanded their blockchain services, with Visa launching a tokenization network specifically for banks to issue stablecoins and piloting programs that allow businesses to fund international payments with stablecoins instead of pre-depositing cash in foreign accounts.
And what about the finance of the 21st century? Nowadays, DeFi has definitely become a new black as the market is projected to grow to $42.76 billion by the end of 2025, corresponding to a substantial compound annual growth rate. As for institutional adoption, engagement is increasing as the 2025 EY / Coinbase Institutional Investor Survey projects that DeFi engagement among institutions could nearly triple, from 24% to 75% in the next two years!
Stablecoins moved $15.6 trillion in 2024, matching Visa's annual volume. Yes, much of that is trading activity, but the utility for real-world payments is growing faster than most traditional players anticipated.
Here's what's actually happening on the ground: Conduit broke $10 billion in annualized volume in 2024, moving 14 currencies across nine countries in LATAM and Africa by connecting domestic payment rails to onchain stablecoin settlement. That's not a pilot anymore! Right there, we can witness a great example of the production infrastructure processing real commercial transactions.
Moreover, Singapore's StraitsX is expanding its payment network across Asia (Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan), with the network launching in Q2 2026 with a goal of improving actual cross-border business payments.
JPMorgan launched Kinexys Digital Payments for institutional cross-border stablecoin transactions, and in June 2025, introduced JPMD, a deposit token representing commercial bank money with 24/7 settlement. They are doing it because businesses want to fund international payments with stablecoins instead of pre-depositing cash in foreign accounts.
The overall global pattern is pretty clear: stablecoins found product-market fit not by replacing the entire financial system, but by solving a specific, painful problem as the near-$1 quadrillion in inefficiencies in traditional cross-border payments.
Despite this momentum, significant hurdles persist. Regulatory fragmentation remains perhaps the most pressing challenge. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation requires specific blockchain compliance features, while proposed US legislation like the GENIUS Act enforces different requirements. As regulations vary across jurisdictions, interoperability across multiple blockchain systems becomes the essential glue that connects global stablecoin access, utility, and liquidity.
Scalability concerns also require ongoing attention. While Layer 2 solutions and cross-chain compatibility are addressing these issues, network congestion and transaction costs can still create barriers during high-volume periods. The technology must continue evolving to handle institutional-scale operations without compromising performance.
Perhaps most importantly, many traditional financial institutions still lack clarity on how to integrate these technologies safely and compliantly. A recent report from The Payments Association and Payall warns that stablecoins alone won't solve the deep-rooted inefficiencies in cross-border payments, but harmonized regulation and trusted infrastructure are equally critical.
At Anodos, we've learned something crucial about building onchain finance infrastructure: the most important integrations won't make headlines. They won't involve celebrity endorsements or conference keynotes. It’s more about the boring infrastructure that makes money move faster, cheaper, and more transparently. Our mission has always been to simplify onchain finance and make it accessible to everyone. We see this integration between traditional and decentralized finance not as a competition, but as an evolution toward something better. Perhaps, a financial system that combines the best of both worlds.
The institutions moving fastest aren't treating blockchain as a replacement for existing infrastructure anymore. Companies are integrating it strategically and using it where it provides clear advantages: faster settlements, transparent transactions, lower costs, and expanded access. But at the end of the day, they're building bridges, not walls.
This is the future we're building toward, a world where money moves as freely and efficiently as information, where financial services are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, and where the underlying technology becomes invisible infrastructure that simply works. The road to truly interoperable money won't be instantaneous, and it will involve a lot of challenges. Regulatory frameworks must evolve, technical standards need harmonization, and legacy systems require careful integration. But the direction is clear, the momentum is building, and the transformation is already underway.
Your money, your rules—this is our motto and our actual operational mode. This is the future we're building toward: a world where money moves as efficiently as information, where financial services are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, and where the underlying technology becomes invisible infrastructure that simply works better than what came before.
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