When Hunter Biden‘s $LAPTOP token lost most of its value within an hour of launching on Base in early September, the coverage focused on the politics. Less attention went to the network underneath it, which also carries a large share of the world’s stablecoin payments.
Raj Kamal is founder and chief executive of TransFi, a Dubai-based cross-border payments company that settles business payments on stablecoin rails with a focus on emerging markets across Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Before TransFi he was global head of investments and M&A for payments and fintech at Naspers and led payments in Asia Pacific at McKinsey. In written answers to The Fintech Times, he explained why he thinks payment volume and speculation need to be separated, in the data and in regulation.
“It tells me these chains have become shared plumbing, and the loud events on them are a small part of what they carry,” Kamal said.
He set the token’s first hour of trading, roughly $19 million according to Quartz, against the $565 billion in adjusted stablecoin volume Base carried in June, around 31.5 per cent of the global total according to Visa‘s onchain analytics. “They’re different measures, but the gap in size tells you where the weight of activity sits.”
The harder question, he said, is how much of that volume is actually payments. Visa’s adjusted figures already strip out bots, exchange transfers and high-frequency trading, and its dashboard now tags payments separately from DeFi, trading and funds that are simply being held. “That’s the number I’d watch,” he said. “A payroll run, a supplier invoice, and a celebrity token all look the same to the network. Telling them apart is the job of regulated operators, and that’s where the scrutiny should sit.”
Where stablecoins win, and where they do not
Kamal said stablecoins clearly beat correspondent banking on timing and on trapped cash. “A stablecoin transfer settles in minutes, on a Sunday or a public holiday,” he said. By contrast, only 11 of the large-value bank systems that answered the latest survey by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), covering 82 jurisdictions, run around the clock. Payment providers pre-fund accounts in each market to get around that, and the cost of the trapped cash ends up in the price of every payment. “When you can rebalance in minutes, any day of the week, those buffers can be much leaner.”
Large-value wholesale flows are another matter. “Banks net positions against each other and extend intraday credit, so a treasurer moving tens of millions doesn’t need every dollar in place upfront,” he said. “A stablecoin transfer has to be fully funded before it moves, and at that size netting still beats speed.”
He also urged perspective on scale, citing estimates referenced this summer by Martin Moloney, deputy secretary general of the Financial Stability Board, that stablecoins carried less than 0.2 per cent of cross-border payments in 2025. “Correspondent banking remains the foundation, and stablecoins are strongest where they extend it.”
The corridors banks left behind
The friction TransFi targets sits between two local currencies that do not trade directly. “Take an importer in Indonesia paying a supplier in Mexico,” Kamal said. “That payment usually travels through dollars and two or three banks, each adding a fee, a delay and a cut-off, and the business often can’t see the final cost until the money lands.” From Dubai, he said, the company sees the same pattern in trade between the Gulf, South Asia and Africa.
“It’s persisted because the economics never worked for the banks,” he said. He pointed to CPMI data showing the number of active correspondent banks working with banks in the Americas outside North America fell 47 per cent between 2011 and 2022, and about 30 per cent across Asia. “Keeping a relationship open carries a fixed compliance cost, and a steady stream of mid-sized invoices from Jakarta doesn’t cover it.”
TransFi connects into the domestic rails at each end, such as QRIS in Indonesia, PIX in Brazil or SPEI in Mexico, and settles between them on stablecoin rails, so the client sees the price before the payment goes.
The company says it supports more than 250 payment methods across more than 70 countries. Kamal’s rule for what to build is simple. “We build whatever decides the outcome for the customer, and we connect to whatever is local by nature,” he said. Routing, pricing, compliance screening, treasury and reconciliation stay in-house, because “if a payment is delayed, mispriced or stopped, we have to be able to explain exactly why, to the client and to a regulator”. Domestic schemes, wallets, QR networks and card schemes are reached through partners, often a bank or licensed local firm, since only 45 per cent of fast payment systems in the CPMI survey give non-banks direct access. “So 250-plus payment methods means planning for 250-plus ways a payment can fail.”
Contamination by proximity
The main risk of sharing networks with speculators, Kamal said, is “contamination by proximity”. “On a public network, a wallet paying your client may have touched scam proceeds two hops earlier, and criminals like stablecoins for the same reasons businesses do.”
He cited the Financial Action Task Force’s finding in July that most identified on-chain illicit activity now involves stablecoins, and Chainalysis figures putting their share of illicit crypto volume at 84 per cent in 2025, even though illicit activity stayed below 1 per cent of all crypto volume. “So screening has to cover the wallet and its history as well as the customer.”
On volatility, he said a business paying suppliers through TransFi never touches the speculative side of the network: it pays in local currency, the supplier receives local currency, and the stablecoin leg is in transit for minutes. “The volatility businesses actually feel is FX and bank access.” The company screens every transaction in real time, sends anything ambiguous to its compliance team for a human decision, and chooses the stablecoins it settles in on the strength of their reserves and redemption.
Rules to design around
Kamal named three regulatory developments. In the UAE, where TransFi is based, the Central Bank’s new law brings virtual-asset payment services inside its licensing perimeter, with the one-year transition window closing this month. Its payment token rules allow dirham tokens from licensed issuers to be used for any lawful purpose, while foreign-currency tokens are largely limited to buying virtual assets. “Anyone moving money through the UAE has to design the customer-facing leg around that line, and we have.”
In Brazil, the central bank’s Resolution 561 bars foreign exchange providers from settling cross-border payments in crypto, stablecoins included, from 1 October. “That’s why we design every corridor so the settlement rail can change market by market,” he said.
The development that would most change TransFi’s roadmap is in Washington. The GENIUS Act lets the US Treasury decide which foreign stablecoin regimes are comparable to its own, and Treasury’s proposed rules are open for comment until 19 October. “If regimes like the UAE’s or Singapore’s are recognised, stablecoins issued under them get a route into the US market, and liquidity can move across those corridors far more easily,” Kamal said. “If they aren’t, the market splits into separate pools by jurisdiction, and every corridor carries that cost.”
The misconception
The biggest misconception, in his view, is that stablecoin payments rise and fall with the crypto market. “They share networks, so the headlines tend to blur them together. Underneath, the users, the rules and the economics have already moved apart,” he said. “A treasurer paying a supplier in Lagos or Manila holds a dollar token for minutes to settle an invoice, and has no view on where token prices go next.”
He set out his own test. Most of the G20’s cross-border payment targets fall due at the end of 2027, and the Financial Stability Board has already said they are unlikely to be met on time. The World Bank‘s latest global average cost of sending $200 abroad was 6.36 per cent, more than double the 3 per cent target for 2030. “If I’m right, payments will be a growing share of stablecoin activity by early 2028, and costs in the most expensive corridors will be coming down measurably,” Kamal said. “If payments stay flat while trading keeps climbing, the sceptics will have been right, and I’ll say so.”
Treasury’s consultation on the GENIUS Act rules closes on 19 October, and Brazil’s restriction on stablecoin settlement by foreign exchange providers takes effect on 1 October.
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