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Payment Rails

A collection of 12 posts

NEAR: The L1 Where Chain Abstraction Actually Works — but the Token Still Waits on the AI-Agent Economy

NEAR — co-founded by a Transformer co-author — shipped what most 'AI coins' only pitch: working chain abstraction (NEAR Intents, 35+ chains, ~$21.7B volume) and a fee-buyback flywheel, with inflation halved to 2.5%. But it's still net-inflationary and DeFi is thin (~$147M) vs a ~$2.4B cap.

Stellar: The Cross-Border Rail Institutions Use; and the Token That Doesn't Capture It

Stellar quietly became production infrastructure for regulated payments and tokenized RWAs — Franklin BENJI ($654M), native Circle USDC + CCTP, MoneyGram corridors — on an elegant non-PoS consensus. Two honest gaps: XLM decoupled from network usage, and a 7-org tier-1 quorum racing to 13.

USDC (Circle): Regulated US Stablecoin & Institutional Settlement Infrastructure

$78.2B USDC supply. $30.7B CRCL market cap. ~86% reserves via BlackRock. Q1 2026 revenue $694M, net income $55M. The regulated US institutional stablecoin rail — Circle post-IPO economics, SVB precedent, Coinbase rev-share, GENIUS Act compliance decoded.

USDT (Tether): Dominant USD Settlement Rail & Centralized Stablecoin Infrastructure

$189.7B supply. ~$141B in US Treasuries. 58.7% stablecoin market share. The protocol-level analysis of crypto's dominant USD settlement rail — reserves, Tron dominance, freeze function, KPMG audit, MiCA delisting decoded.

XRP: The Bank's Crypto

XRP is the crypto built for banks — the cross-border bridge asset that won its 2025 SEC war, got spot ETFs, and built RLUSD plus ~$4B of tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger. Cache256 on the token-vs-ledger question: does XRP capture what the ledger builds, or does Ripple's RLUSD replace it?

A7A5: The Programmable Ruble Rail

A7A5: The Programmable Ruble Rail

A7A5 is the ruble-pegged stablecoin powering post-sanctions trade. Issued in Kyrgyzstan, backed by Promsvyazbank, Tron-dominant. $100B+ in volume, 15% APY, 41K wallets — the programmable RUB rail for restricted economies.

x402 Is Live, Scaled, and Controlled. Here's What That Means for You.

x402 Is Live, Scaled, and Controlled. Here's What That Means for You.

x402 turned a 30-year-old unused HTTP status code into the backbone of the agentic economy. AI agents are now hiring each other, paying in USDC, and settling on-chain in 2 seconds. 115M+ transactions in Q1 2026. $74M settled. Here's the full stack, the real numbers, and who controls the gates.

Unstoppable Domains: Web3 Identity Infrastructure Analysis

Unstoppable Domains: Web3 Identity Infrastructure Analysis

Unstoppable Domains bridges Web3 identity and traditional DNS. ICANN-accredited, ~4.7M Web3 domains, 950k+ DNS domains managed, and lifetime ownership with no renewals. The hybrid naming layer for sovereign and mainstream internet identity.

Tron: The Rail Washington Can't Reach

Tron carries roughly half of all USDT (~$88B) — the dollar rail for the emerging-market grey economy, beyond the GENIUS Act's reach. Yet Tether froze $344M and ISIS-K wallets on it in 2026: the uncensorable rail is censorable, by the issuer not the state. Cache256 on the USDT chokepoint.

Bitcoin: From Speculation to Reserve Infrastructure

$1.63T market cap. ~1000 EH/s hashrate. $108B spot ETF AUM. Strategy holds 818,869 BTC. US Strategic Reserve operational via Trump EO. Tether holds ~$7.9B BTC. Protocol-level analysis of Bitcoin as operational sovereign reserve infrastructure, post-Halving IV era.

Programmable Services: Banking's Blockchain Capture Strategy

Programmable Services: Banking's Blockchain Capture Strategy

Banks aren't adopting blockchain. They're absorbing it. JPMorgan Kinexys, Quant, Fiserv — programmable money delivered through permissioned ledgers and API gateways the banks already control. Blockchain benefits, banking custody. This isn't adaptation. It's capture.

Signal: The Payment Rail Is the Power Rail

In Web3, the rail you choose to pay with isn't neutral: it's governance. This brief decodes the logic embedded in each L2.