In 2020, Angela Strange stood on stage at a16z and said every company would become a fintech company. Apple built a credit card. Shopify started making close to half its revenue from financial services. Uber became your bank if you drove for a living. In the year she gave that talk, close to 2,000 fintech companies launched.

The thesis materialized faster than anyone expected.

Now the sequel is running in real time, and it's moving faster than the original. a16z's own crypto team is called stablecoins the industry's killer app heading into 2026, and the same unbundling argument is repeating itself. The version that took a decade the first time is compressing into a couple of years.

Start with the part that already broke.

World Bank data puts the average cost of sending $200 across borders at 6.4% in early 2026. Banks charge close to 15% in some corridors. Money transfer operators average closer to 4.7%. Stablecoin rails move the same money for under 1%.

That gap is the entire business model of correspondent banking, and it is contracting corridor by corridor.

Strange's original piece had the number that explains why. At one large bank, 30,000 of 210,000 employees worked solely in compliance, filing suspicious activity reports for a system that still misses over 97% of laundered money. Stablecoin rails route around that cost structure entirely. Transparent, programmable ledgers replace armies of manual reviewers, and the savings land directly in what it costs to move a dollar across a border.

The receipts are already sovereign-sized.

Stablecoin supply sits at $312 billion as of writing, up from roughly $124 billion at the end of 2023. More than double in under three years, while bitcoin chopped sideways and altcoins bled out. Tether alone holds $184 billion of that and carries close to $141 billion in Treasury exposure, enough to rank as the 17th largest holder of American government debt, ahead of Germany and the UAE. Circle isn't far behind, managing roughly $79 billion in USDC reserves, with about 84% tied to Treasuries.

Two private companies now sit at the same table as sovereign nations in the Treasury market.

Klarna is launching KlarnaUSD on the Tempo network. Fiserv is building its own rail. Visa, Mastercard, and Western Union are wiring stablecoin settlement into products that used to run entirely on ACH and SWIFT. PayPal already moved billions through PYUSD. None of these companies started as crypto companies. They're becoming stablecoin companies the same way Uber and Shopify became fintech companies a decade ago, because the margin sitting inside payments got too large to ignore.

Underneath all of it is yield. Treasuries backing stablecoin reserves currently pay issuers north of 3.7%. The average US savings account pays 0.38%, according to the FDIC. Banks keep almost the entire spread. Once yield-bearing stablecoins become the default, and Circle, Ethena, and a growing list of issuers are already racing there, that spread migrates to depositors and takes cheap bank funding with it. Whoever holds the float wins this fight, and stablecoins are winning in the corridors banks have been failing in.

Every basis point that migrates from a bank's balance sheet to a stablecoin holder is a basis point that a bank can no longer lend against. Banks cannot out-market that math.

The clearest evidence isn't in Miami or Manhattan. It's in the corridors traditional finance never built for.

Roughly 350 million people across Africa don't have a bank account, though the continent already has more active prepaid SIM cards than formal accounts. Fonbnk addresses this gap by enabling users to convert mobile airtime balances into U.S. dollar stablecoins across Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, TON, and other major networks, and it has already onboarded more than a million users across ten countries on roughly $6 million raised. Nobody needed a checking account first. They needed a phone that already had a balance on it.

That's not a crypto trade - that's infrastructure filling a gap banks left open for decades, one phone balance at a time.

The same shift is happening on the spending side. BitGifty lets someone hold stablecoins in a wallet like MiniPay and spend them directly on everyday purchases, mobile top-ups, gift cards, and bill payments, across more than multiple countries and merchants, without converting back to cash first. Spending stablecoins stopped requiring an off-ramp. It just became commerce.

None of this needed crypto prices to rally. Stablecoin supply grew through a stretch where bitcoin sold off hard, and that is the clearest signal that adoption has detached from speculation.

The bet was unbundling, and stablecoins turned into the fastest version of it the market has seen.

Strange's original argument was that financial services would unbundle from banks and rebuild as infrastructure any company could plug into. Stablecoins are the fastest-moving version of that argument, and the businesses moving first, payroll platforms, remittance networks, payment processors, are the ones set up to own the next decade of margin that used to belong to banks.

Your company will touch stablecoins eventually. The only open variable is how much market share you hand a competitor while you wait to find out.

Every week we share insights into the stablecoin infrastructure landscape. Those exact insights come from our interactive dashboard called Stablescape.

Today, the platform tracks ~3,500 companies across 137 countries, helping us identify where the next generation of financial infrastructure is being built. Explore the dataset:

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Disclosure: Verda Ventures may hold positions in companies named here. Tether is an anchor investor in our fund. For informational purposes only, not investment advice.