When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, it signaled the dawn of a winner-take-all era. Stripe’s recent $1 billion acquisition of Bridge reminds us that history rhymes: the infrastructure has matured, the market is heating up, and the battle for control of the next financial stack has begun.

Stablecoins are more than another fintech feature. They are a new substrate for money and markets, colliding head-on with legacy rails that still run on pre-90s infrastructure. Experts we spoke to – like Plasma’s CEO Paul, Nikola VP Payments at TON among others – describe them in many ways: cheap cross-border payments, inflation hedge, programmable savings, capital efficiency, regulatory settlement layer. As in the classic tale of the blind men describing the elephant, they are all right. Stablecoins are all of these things at once.

But there is one part of the elephant almost everyone overlooks: identity. Every serious use case — from remittances to credit, from neobanks to marketplaces — eventually collides with the same question: who is the user? In social media, the chokepoint of identity was captured by a handful of platforms. Walled gardens won, and innovation stalled.

Fixing the tracks to stay open is not some nostalgic dream of early internet idealists — it’s a smart and plain business decision. In social media, only a handful became oligarchs; everyone else was trapped on their platforms. In the stablecoin economy, the smart banks, fintechs, and crypto-native neobanks will learn from the past and avoid platform risks.  

Adopting open standards alone is not enough. The real task is to spot the chokepoint and fix it open. And just as in social media, the chokepoint is identity. Which path we take now will define whether stablecoins become another closed empire — or the foundation of an open internet of money.

Bigger than you think it is

Let’s start with the basics: What is this stablecoin economy? Spoiler alert: Ask five blind people and you will get five (or more) answers.