The Future of Payments: Why Finance 3.0 Won’t Be Fully on the Blockchain
Every 10 to 20 years, software gets rewritten. The top HR platforms today look nothing like the ones from the early 2000s — new technology, new requirements, new expectations. That’s just how software evolves.
But the interesting thing is: our financial rails haven’t really evolved. The backbone of how money moves around the world — from banks to remittance networks to payment processors — is still running on infrastructure that’s been largely unchanged since the 1990s. That’s a 25-year cycle of the same rails. And the reason for that is simple: regulation and compliance. Moving money is an incredibly good business if you can do it compliantly. But it’s also one of the hardest areas to innovate in because the rules are strict, the stakes are high, and regulators don’t like surprises.
Now, a lot of people in the blockchain and crypto community believe that blockchain is the right solution for these rails — that “Finance 3.0” will be built entirely on decentralized, public ledgers. But if you look closely at how these systems were designed, that was never really the goal. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most other networks were not created to be global payment systems. They were experiments in decentralized ownership and digital scarcity — not compliance-first payment infrastructure.
What’s happened over time is that we’ve tried to force that use case onto the technology, layering on all sorts of requirements — privacy controls, KYC, AML, settlement rules — that the original specs never accounted for. It’s like trying to retrofit an open-source chat app into a HIPAA-compliant medical records system. You can do it, but it’s not what it was built for.
And when you zoom out, the economics don’t really work either. Even the cheapest blockchains today are still relatively expensive compared to just moving money through databases and trusted intermediaries. Public auditability — every transaction visible on-chain — might sound like a feature, but it’s actually a bug for most compliant financial systems. The trade-offs don’t make sense for payments at scale.
That said, I do think we’ll see a new generation of financial rails emerge — something that sits in the middle ground between traditional finance and crypto. Always-on, global, programmable systems that are semi-private, compliant, and interoperable, but not necessarily public. Think of them like company-specific “Venmos” that can talk to each other. I don’t think these will live on Solana or Ethereum — they’ll be built on private or consortium blockchains, like Stripe’s Tempo initiative or similar semi-private ledgers.
Public blockchains will still have their place — primarily for speculative and entertainment-based activity, which is actually what most people use them for today. Meme coins, attention-based tokens, and community currencies are fascinating experiments in collective ownership and culture. And the U.S. regulatory environment is slowly catching up to allow those things to exist more safely for both retail and more advanced traders. Crypto bros will forever want to believe that blockchain is a solve-all for payments - it’s not true though - you need real systems and engineering to make a good payments system that’s secure.
But when people try to make “serious” tokenized versions of equities or assets — things meant to behave like public securities but without the same protections — that’s where things get murky. The math doesn’t line up, and the compliance layer isn’t there.
The exception is stablecoins. Stablecoins are quietly one of the most important financial innovations of the past decade. They’ll be everywhere. But even they don’t need to live on public blockchains to be transformative. The real innovation is in the idea — instant, programmable, digital dollars — not necessarily the network they live on.
So, in short:
Public blockchains are amazing for speculation, culture, and ownership experiments.
Semi-private, regulated blockchains are where compliant money movement will likely happen.
The next financial rails won’t be fully decentralized — they’ll be 24/7, interoperable, compliant, and fast, but with guardrails.
Because in the end, it’s not about ideology. It’s about using the right tool for the right job.