There’s an old story about two young fish swimming along when they pass an older fish coming the other way:
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
The two fish swim on for a while before one finally turns to the other and asks: “What the hell is water?”
I think about that story a lot, and recently within the context of stablecoins…
Yesterday at Stablecon, we announced that Velocity is empowering MVB Bank to become the first U.S. sponsor bank to settle eligible Visa Direct push-to-card flows onchain using stablecoins. There’s plenty to unpack there, but the part I find most interesting is that, for the person ultimately receiving the money, almost none of it matters.
MVB is still the bank. Visa Direct is still the payment network. The recipient gets dollars on their card. Somewhere underneath all of that, stablecoins can move the liquidity that makes the payment possible. In other words, the interesting part may be precisely how uninteresting, and eventually invisible (like water), the stablecoin becomes.
For years, much of the conversation in the cryptoverse has focused on getting people to use stablecoins; how to upgrade the “UX” of crypto. I think the much bigger opportunity is using stablecoins to make the financial products people already use work better. In essence, to fade into the financial water that we’re all swimming in. Not another financial system we have to convince people to enter, but part of the infrastructure they barely have to think about. Part of the water.
Take prefunding. An enormous amount of capital sits trapped across the payments ecosystem simply because money can’t always move when and where it needs to. Payment companies fund accounts ahead of time. Banks maintain buffers. Treasury teams move money before weekends and holidays. We’ve built an entire system around the assumption that liquidity needs to be waiting before the payment arrives.
Stablecoins begin to change that assumption. If money can move 24/7, you can start shifting from “How much money do I need to leave here?” to “How quickly can I get money here when I need it?” Suddenly, prefunding turns into just-in-time funding and it brings a radical new paradigm of treasury management.
MVB estimates these capabilities at more than $10 billion in annual payment volume onchain. That is a small number compared to where this is headed, but the number is almost less interesting than where it’s happening: inside an existing U.S. bank, connected to one of the largest payment networks in the world, supporting payment flows that already exist today. No new financial universe required.
Visa Direct is just one example. The same idea applies across issuing, acquiring, payouts, treasury and cross-border liquidity; anywhere capital sits idle because the infrastructure underneath it moves too slowly. I suspect this is what stablecoin adoption will increasingly look like: not a parallel financial system, but a better settlement layer, nearly invisible, underneath the one we already have.
Perhaps the real sign that stablecoins have arrived is when we stop talking about stablecoins altogether. They simply become part of the water.
