The Crypto Revolution Remains Half-Built

Opinion by: Timothy Chen, global head of strategy, Mantle 

While crypto adoption accelerates across Southeast Asia and Latin America, a deeper structural problem persists: Payments remain slow, error-prone and exclusionary. The premise of financial sovereignty through blockchain remains tantalizingly incomplete. 

Millions hold digital assets, yet they cannot seamlessly integrate them into daily life. This paradoxical disconnect — digital wealth without practical utility — represents a critical infrastructural gap where emerging markets suffer most. 

The world’s unbanked may now hold tokens but still lack essential access to simple financial tools, from cross-border payments to options for sustainable yield. At the same time, emerging markets foreshadow where the world’s going — where most of our savings will not be in fiat but in stablecoins. 

Crypto’s problem with capital access 

For emerging markets, stablecoins serve as a lifeline, offering regulatory arbitrage that enables dollarized savings accounts. For the first time, users in these countries can participate in the largest and strongest capital markets — the  United States. The next step is accessing US treasury bills as a safe yielding product, and so we will likely see continued growth in tokenized funds, like BlackRock’s BUIDL. 

This isn’t a 10x better product for existing USD-denominated users, but for non-dollarized users — especially in emerging markets — USD stablecoins are a life changer.

Consider users in these markets putting away savings in USD stables but having no way to actually draw on those savings because they don’t have enough avenues to off-ramp or spend them. 

While users in emerging economies eagerly adopt cryptocurrencies to escape local currency devaluation, they’ve entered a one-directional financial system: digital assets without functional off-ramps. 

It’s ironic how there is $100 billion in Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the US that can be sold with instant liquidity, and yet there are no good off-ramps for stablecoin holders in emerging markets. This asymmetry leaves crypto’s promise of financial sovereignty theoretical in regions that need it most. 

Payments as the real inclusion frontier 

For emerging markets experiencing high inflation, stablecoins offer critical financial stability. Yet, accessing and spending these assets remains a perilous journey through a patchwork of banks, payment rails and peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. 

The notable embrace of stablecoin infrastructure in a regulatory climate spearheaded by US President Donald Trump — with players like Meta, Visa, Stripe and Fidelity renewing explorations — demonstrates blockchain’s most immediate value proposition for cross-border payments. 

These fundamentally represent centralized adaptations constrained by legacy architecture: an approach that leans on blockchain as an incremental enhancement to existing rails rather than a reimagination of financial infrastructure. Limitations that perpetuate exclusionary access in emerging markets remain. 

Another central challenge is regulation. In the last five years, many crypto services in Latin America and Southeast Asia offered ways for users to exchange their local currency to a USD stablecoin. Banks were uncomfortable with such services, however, and these players constantly shuffled bank accounts to maintain operations.

Last-mile off-ramping is also a massive problem in markets like Africa or South Asia, where users lack stable internet, smartphone access or simple banking services. These are the users who would benefit the most.

Designing finance that works for the world’s majority 

Emerging economies represent the perfect testbed for blockchain’s practical utility beyond ideological decentralization. Like how Chinese users leapfrogged emails and credit cards and moved straight into adopting mobile messaging and digital payments in less than a decade, emerging markets are poised to lead the global adoption of crypto-native banking. 

The migration from 5% to 50+% of financial activities onchain will begin where traditional systems are the weakest. Southeast Asia and Latin America are the frontiers where crypto neobanks will address real-world economic challenges beyond speculation. With today’s favorable regulation and infrastructure, more users can access stablecoins for their everyday lives. 

Yet, one crucial piece remains missing: the banking account layer. Most existing services offer self-custodial wallets and a debit card for off-ramping, but no easy way to on-ramp. 

The imperative for a full-loop financial system

A crypto neobank integrated with a modular layer-2 Ethereum network could represent the architectural blueprint for solving these structural challenges. Owning the infrastructure stack enables better unit economics and allows deposits through familiar, TradFi-secured bank transfer rails. 

Related: Revolut eyes French license and $1.1B expansion amid EU growth

Today, most solutions offer only half the journey: allowing users to convert local currency to digital assets but creating a “Hotel California” effect where these assets cannot easily return to the real economy. This one-directional approach undermines practical utility, particularly in emerging markets where daily spending needs remain tied to local commerce.

Creating unified accounts for fiat and crypto with real-world spending capabilities and full-loop systems enable the complete financial cycle from salary receipt to everyday spending. The ultimate expression of this full-loop potential would be capturing salary direct deposits into these unified accounts: the true financial “holy grail” that eliminates the perpetual friction of moving between traditional and digital financial systems. 

Until income is widely received in stablecoins, the world needs these robust interfaces between systems, not just as radical alternatives to traditional finance but as evolutionary bridges. Banking-first models tap into existing user habits and are poised to capture the impending shift of financial activity to blockchain.

Equitable, decentralized financial access for all 

Just as neobanks today reimagined banking for the mobile era, crypto neobanking also needs to spawn from first principles. A holistic onchain financial architecture that enables a full-loop off- and on-ramping experience is essential to address emerging market needs: protecting users from currency devaluation while enabling practical utility.  

It’s as much of a product design challenge as a technical one. The vision is to build a seamless interface blending DeFi and fiat and provide equitable access to finance for all, like how the Windows operating system simplified computing through its user interface or how Apple ushered in the smartphone era by making complex technology accessible and intuitive.

Opinion by: Timothy Chen, global head of strategy, Mantle. 

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.