Programmable Money Meets Fragmented Markets
Stablecoins settled $27.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing Visa and Mastercard's combined transaction volume for the first time (CEX.IO, Stablecoin Landscape Report, 2025). That number carries caveats: roughly 70% was bot-driven, and the comparison conflates settlement with payment authorization. But the directional signal is unambiguous. Financial infrastructure is being rewritten on programmable rails, and the institutions that built the old rails are joining the rewrite rather than fighting it. The markets most exposed to this shift aren't retail payments. They're the fragmented commodity markets, from energy to carbon, where settlement still runs on spreadsheets, checks, and month-long cycles.
