In most of the world, the US dollar is the hottest commodity there is, and supply rarely meets demand.
The reason is plumbing more than economics. The rails that move dollars cheaply between New York, London, and Tokyo were never built to reach Lagos, Nairobi, or Buenos Aires. One of the largest food producers on the African continent can secure only about a quarter of the dollars it needs to import through the banking system, and the rest can take more than thirty days to settle.
That gap, repeated across dozens of currencies, is where stablecoins became infrastructure.
The following is a recap of key themes from the conversation. For the full discussion, watch Episode 4 (Part 2) here.
Part one covered US adoption with Yuval Rooz and Acting CFTC Chairman Caroline Pham; part two crosses the rest of the map.
Chris Maurice started Yellow Card in 2016 from his Auburn University dorm room and launched in Lagos in 2019. It grew from a retail Bitcoin exchange into what he calls the largest licensed stablecoin payments provider for emerging markets, now spanning more than fifty currencies and some forty-two countries.
Eric Saraniecki built a desk in illiquid commodities at DRW and co-founded Cumberland, a major crypto liquidity provider, before co-founding Digital Asset in 2014 and steering the Canton Network. He returns as host, tying Yellow Card's problems to the capital markets layer beneath them.
Maurice traces the problem of scarce dollars to information asymmetry and old financial plumbing. Correspondent banking and Swift were built for a handful of major economies, but not for the rest of the world.
His analogy is that for developed markets, money runs on an interstate, while reaching an emerging market means exiting onto a far worse road.
"You've got to take an exit onto a dirt road littered with potholes that haven't been touched since 1985, and your car only gets three tires and half a tank of gas to get there." — Chris Maurice, CEO and co-founder, Yellow Card.
The cost compounds with distance. Many banks across Africa and South America hold no direct US correspondent relationship, so they route dollars through a neighboring country at a markup, sometimes two or three layers deep.
The same friction eventually reaches households. Moving remittances onto stablecoin rails has (in some corridors) more than doubled the money a family actually receives.
Yellow Card does not chase four billion people at the last mile. Banks, telcos, and mobile money networks such as M-Pesa already do that well, and Maurice would rather modernize their infrastructure than rebuild it. Saraniecki frames Canton as the capital markets core beneath those consumer businesses, and pushed back on an industry habit.
"We've fallen in love as an industry with this false narrative that crypto is peer-to-peer." — Eric Saraniecki, co-founder, Digital Asset.
Figure: Correspondent banking takes many hops; Canton settles in one.
Foreign exchange is the bigger, more valuable goal. But it’s also more difficult to crack. Both see promise in fungibility between a local government bond and a local stablecoin, letting institutions rebalance and settle across currencies around the clock. That requires banks and large corporates onchain, and they will not surrender control of consensus, the ledger, or their data.
"These guys are not going to use a chain that they don't have control over the consensus." — Chris Maurice.
Privacy becomes essential here. In thin markets a few million dollars can move an exchange rate, so visible flows invite front-running of the local currency. Canton lets institutions interoperate while keeping positions and counterparties confidential, with regulators granted visibility where required.
For Maurice, that is close to the only credible path to FX onchain at scale.
Yellow Card's own history shows the shift from speculation to payments.
It launched in Nigeria around 2019 on Bitcoin, added USDT soon after, and within roughly four months ran almost entirely on stablecoins. These were used to send money rather than to bet on price.
Most of that volume has historically moved on Tron, because USDT there was the low-cost, liquid option once Ethereum fees made small transfers uneconomic, and habits stuck. Self-custody also runs higher than in the United States, which Maurice attributes to lower trust in local institutions.
Stablecoins also need to be created and redeemed around the clock at scale, and Saraniecki would use short-dated local government bonds as the on and off ramp.
Both warned that exposing a bank's full operations on a transparent ledger would leak customer, liquidity, and volume data that bad actors could trade against, and that in some markets the risk is also physical.
"The wrench attacks are very real." — Eric Saraniecki.
Maurice expects banks and large financial institutions to drive Yellow Card's growth into 2026, adopting faster than US or European peers and using these rails to bypass US correspondent banking.
Only four African countries ban crypto outright, all in the north, while the rest of the continent moves toward licensing, and seven have ranked among the top twenty for adoption.
Saraniecki closed with two forecasts. Friendly jurisdictions may soon let people from almost anywhere open what looks like a global dollar bank account, backed by stablecoins and money market funds.
Local authorities will respond by building their own bond and stablecoin ecosystems to keep value at home. He sees both at scale within two years, but neither working without privacy.
Next in the series: Episode 5 on the fragmented stablecoin stack, with Mohamed Afifi of HiFi, and why the winning rails are the ones users never see.
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Quadrillions is a miniseries produced by Blockworks and sponsored by Canton Network. Listen to the full episode at quadrillionspod.com or click one of the links below.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this show is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. Views expressed are solely those of the guests.