Written by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Block unicorn

In the 1970s, American companies hired consultants to slow down the flow of funds.

This was known as remote payment. To delay payment, buyers in New Jersey would write a check from an unknown bank in Montana, thousands of miles away.

Due to the great distance and additional transfer steps between banks, it would take days for the check to clear. With interest rates soaring above 10%, leaving the money in the account for a few extra days could yield unexpected profits.

Some consultants' jobs were to maintain maps, recording which small-town banks had the longest clearing times. It was the sheer volume of transactions that allowed this model to function. In 1970, Americans wrote 8 billion checks, reaching 16 billion in 1980. The Federal Reserve's float, which consisted of funds that had been credited but not yet redeemed due to checks, averaged about $3 billion a day in 1972. This number more than doubled from 1975 to 1978.

The Federal Reserve was furious about this. In February 1979, the Fed released a report on remote payments, followed by a policy statement urging all banks to cease assisting with such operations. The Monetary Control Act of 1980 called for the complete abolition of this practice. Twenty years later, the 21st Century Check Act finally put an end to the situation. Today, most checks can clear within one business day, and the Federal Reserve processes all checks in a building in Atlanta. That was the end of it.

Siemens has over 12,000 employees across more than 80 countries, with its global business services department handling invoices, payroll, and account reconciliation. Airbus set up an office in Lisbon in July 2021 and currently has over 1,000 employees at this center and in its industrial sectors in Portugal. Goldman Sachs has a total workforce of 47,400.

Then, in September 2024, Siemens issued a bond worth 300 million euros and completed the settlement via blockchain in minutes.

Today, I want to show you the connection between these two facts. Let's get started…

Let's start with bonds, as they are the easiest

In February 2023, Siemens issued 60 million euros on the Polygon platform, waiting two days for the transaction to settle. Eighteen months later, Siemens issued another 300 million euros, exchanging public cryptocurrency networks SWIAT for SWIAT. SWIAT is a consortium built by several European banks, functioning as a closed ledger specifically for trading in compliance with institutional rules. This regulatory fit allowed it to interface with the Bundesbank's trigger solution, automatically settling the entire 300 million euros in central bank currency in minutes.

Investors subscribed directly and saw their registration information immediately after the settlement was completed. Peter Lasgub, the company's CFO, was responsible for both issuances, and the second issuance nearly eliminated all settlement risks for the parties involved.

Typically, institutions like Clearstream (a large central securities depository) must intervene to handle such securities certificates. No employees at Clearstream would lose their jobs over a German bond.

Next is the payroll department

Deel provides payroll management services for over 40,000 businesses and 1.5 million employees across more than 150 countries/regions, with an annual processing amount exceeding 22 billion dollars. Starting January 2026, companies can directly pay all their global payroll with stablecoin treasury. In June 2026, Deel launched its dollar-backed digital balance DLUSD.

What challenges do employers face? Idle liquid funds stuck in overseas bank accounts. Emergency troubleshooting after failed remittances. Exchange fees from forex intermediaries. Manual account reconciliation.

What is there to gain for workers? In Argentina, Turkey, and Ukraine, wages paid in local currency may depreciate by 20% to 40% within a year. In 2025, 85% of Deel's contractors in Argentina chose to be paid in dollars. This June, the company provided them with a dollar balance in the applications they were already using (built on Bridge, Privy, and Tempo platforms) and offered rewards on idle funds. In May of this year, the company began to pay full-time employees' salaries in stablecoins issued on the Polygon platform, amounting to 10% to 25% of their after-tax net wages.

From a financial perspective, the practicality of stablecoins is now backed by solid data. A joint survey by Ernst & Young and Patton found that 13% of companies had adopted stablecoins. Of those, 41% achieved over a 10% cost reduction in cross-border B2B payments. This efficiency improvement saved 5 million dollars in a $50 million transfer project. This amount had previously been accounted for as fixed operational costs. Looking ahead, 54% of non-user respondents plan to adopt this infrastructure within a year.

By February 2026, actual payments of end-user stablecoins are expected to reach about 390 billion dollars per year, doubling that of 2024, with about 60% being business-to-business (B2B) transactions rather than mere trading. Modern credit cards (Hyundai Card) completed a cross-border corporate payment in just 7 minutes. Visa's annual settlement amount across nine stablecoin chains reached 7 billion dollars, growing 50% in one quarter. These are not experimental edge cases conducted by cryptocurrency companies.

Companies are using stablecoins to address the technical issues of slow cross-border settlements and trapped funds discussed earlier.

The third, and largest, least mentioned—collateral

JPMorgan's Kinexys handles about 5 billion dollars in transactions daily, with a cumulative clearing scale of 30 trillion dollars, and intraday repurchase transactions alone exceeding 17.5 trillion dollars. BlackRock has delivered tokenized money market funds as derivatives collateral to Barclays Bank. Bodry processes 354 billion dollars in transactions daily. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is working with Google Cloud to build a similar system aimed at creating a collateral market worth 15 trillion dollars.

I want to explain why collateral needs attention if you are building a house.

A hedge fund holds a position it doesn't want to sell and wants to leverage it as collateral for borrowing. Due to mutual mistrust, the collateral is held by a third-party intermediary. Prior agreements govern the intermediary's contract. Then, the asset circulates for several days, accumulating fees.

Semi-liquid assets ensure the original safety of the collateral and change how borrowers use it. It can freeze the collateral, adjust spending conditions, or even bypass transfers. Just like Kinexys, its valuation can reach up to 15 trillion dollars. Look at the jobs that have survived with the proliferation of software; the logistics of transferring collateral have vanished, leaving only those challenging human judgments necessary for assessing asset values and making default decisions at midnight. This is my advice to anyone deciding on budget directions.

This means that technology cannot eliminate the costs of misjudging trading counterparts. It also explains why some projects succeed while others fail.

Between 2018 and 2020, several large enterprises, including HSBC, Maersk, and BNP Paribas, launched four trade finance blockchain networks. But none of them survived past 2023.

• June 2022 - we.trade declared bankruptcy.
• November 2022 - Maersk and IBM shut down TradeLens.
• Early 2023 - Marco Polo Restaurant closed with a debt of 4.6 million dollars.
• November 2023 - Contour closed after completing only 60 to 70 transactions on average per month (later acquired by XDC Network).

Faster electronic letters of credit improve document processing speeds while not affecting the core costs of credit underwriting.

Komgo is the only survivor among these companies. Its survival to this day is attributed to its abandonment of blockchain technology. Komgo was launched by several large banks in 2018, initially offering digital letters of credit and document workflow tools. The letter of credit product ultimately failed, while the paper document product continued to operate. As competitors attempted to digitalize trust and subsequently collapsed, Komgo survived by completely transforming and focusing on mechanical pipeline business.

Tether demonstrates what happens when a financial company refuses to assess trading counterparts. It plays the role of a mechanical pipeline, receiving dollars, holding government bonds, and issuing tokens, while actual customer transactions are processed by exchanges, thereby eliminating the operational costs of human trust. This fully automated asset transfer model allowed a team of 300 to achieve profits of 10.09 billion dollars in 2025. Tether's per-employee income reached an astounding 33.6 million dollars, far exceeding that of traditional risk management banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

Subsequently, the company began venturing into the credit sector. Its secured loans increased from 14.6 billion dollars on September 30 to 17.04 billion dollars by December 31, growing nearly 7 billion dollars within six months. Although the identities of the borrowers are confidential, these loans are backed by a safety net of 6.34 billion dollars.

When Tether began lending again, it had to hire personnel to assess collateral and pursue margin calls late at night.

Two details severely distorted Tether's profitability. First, nearly half of its profits came solely from the surge in the prices of its massive gold and bitcoin reserves. Second, the tokens it issued worth billions of dollars incurred no interest payments. If a traditional bank held such a massive amount of customer funds, it would have to pay billions of dollars in interest yearly.

Circle also showcases the same boundaries from another side. According to its 10-K report, the company expects distribution costs associated with Coinbase to reach 1.4 billion dollars in 2025, up from a previous estimate of 924.5 million dollars. This means that 51% of its 2.7 billion dollars in revenue flows to Coinbase, which neither issues USDC nor manages reserves. Coinbase is responsible for user registrations, KYC processes, and anti-fraud teams. Verifying customer identities still requires human judgment. Circle has reduced its workforce by completely outsourcing this process, turning what should have been accounted for as internal payroll expense into an external contract expense.

So, where to build?

Enterprise blockchain and stablecoin technology solve three major operational challenges. They automate the flow of cash, collateral, and credentials; free up idle funds that were previously trapped in payroll floats and escrow accounts; and eliminate cross-border friction in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia—which is precisely where executives report cost reductions of 10%.

Corporate bond issuance has become almost overlooked. Germany's eWpG project allowed Siemens to successfully issue bonds. By June 2024, the total issuance of eWpG digital securities was approximately 236 million euros, with Germany's Reconstruction Credit Institute (KfW) issuing 150 million euros through two transactions. However, this hardly affects the prosperity of the European corporate bond market.

In the past, financial officers profited from delayed settlements. After floating interest rates disappeared, they turned to managing pre-funded accounts. Today, tokenization has fundamentally changed this situation.