Cryptocurrency was supposed to cut out the middleman. Almost two decades later, the middlemen are still standing. Some of them have just learned to write better code. Stablecoins and blockchain payment systems have made real progress against the delays, fees and layers that clog the movement of money. What they have not done is abolish the need for trust, custody, compliance and liquidity. Someone still has to supply those things, and increasingly that someone is a stablecoin issuer, an exchange, a custodian or a payment platform. The question worth asking, then, is whether crypto can strip power from the ones that add cost without adding value, and force the survivors to be more transparent, more competitive and more accountable than they have ever had to be. 

The problem is in the plumbing

Our financial system was built when banks and national payment networks each operated inside their own walls. Crossing those walls required someone to verify instructions, convert currencies, run compliance checks and reconcile the separate ledgers every institution insisted on keeping. The arrangement works. It is also expensive. The World Bank found that sending a modest international remittance cost 6.36% of the amount transferred, on average, in the third quarter of 2025.

Blockchain offers shared infrastructure instead of private records argued over afterward. Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements, put seven central banks and more than 40 regulated institutions behind a prototype using tokenized commercial-bank deposits and central-bank reserves, where the pieces of a multicurrency transaction complete as a single event and compliance rules are written into the transaction itself. It is an experiment, and it deliberately keeps correspondent banking at the center. It is still blockchain’s sharpest challenge to the incumbents. It does not make banks obsolete. It makes them answer why a single payment needs so many institutions, databases and settlement stages to finish.

Stablecoins are already inside the system

Stablecoins have allowed dollar-denominated value to travel freely, whenever and to wherever the payer so desires. Visa reported stablecoin settlement across VisaNet at an annualized run rate of roughly $7 billion as of March 2026. But notice what did not happen. Stablecoins did not replace Visa. Visa absorbed them and kept what made it powerful in the first place, namely access, governance and commercial reach. At ForumPay, we work the other side of the same logic, absorbing the conversion and the volatility so a customer can pay in cryptocurrency and a merchant be paid in fiat.

The one element of all this that no amount of code has managed to automate is trust. A dollar-backed token is useful only because people believe it can be redeemed for a dollar, which is what the GENIUS Act conceded in July 2025 when it required reserves backing outstanding tokens at least one for one. That is not a betrayal of crypto’s founding ambition. It is the asset that carries trust being pulled loose from the infrastructure value has always had to travel through. 

The new gatekeepers

Almost everyone still needs somewhere to buy, store, convert and spend, which has created exchanges, issuers, custodians, wallets and payment gateways, some running trading, custody, lending and token issuance under one roof. The Financial Stability Board calls these firms multifunction crypto-asset intermediaries and warns that stacking so many activities in one place invites conflicts of interest and concentrates market power. 

That is the contradiction at the heart of the crypto economy. The networks are decentralized while the doors into them are not. USDC travels across public blockchains, but Circle says most of its reserve sits in a money-market fund run by BlackRock and held in custody largely at BNY Mellon. Stripe bought the infrastructure platform Bridge and now offers stablecoin-powered accounts to businesses in 101 countries. The intermediary, therefore, became a software company with keys to both the banking system and the blockchain.

So judge the new gatekeepers on something other than the technology they run on. Are the fees legible? Can customers leave and take their assets with them? Can one firm issue an asset, hold it, trade it and lend against it with nobody checking? Crypto is unlikely to offer us a financial system with no gatekeepers. It will more likely be one in which the gatekeepers can be compared, challenged and replaced. Anyone standing between us and our money should have to say, plainly, what they are there for.

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