The War Between Stablecoins and Banking May Not Actually Exist

Noah LevineOriginal Author: Noah Levine

Compiled by | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Translated by | Wenser (@wenser2010)

Editor's Note: The crypto industry and traditional financial market banks have long been in a state of tense confrontation. The proposal and stalled progress of stablecoin regulation bills like the GENIUS ACT and crypto structure bills like the CLARITY ACT are, to some extent, highly related to this adversarial state. For traditional banks, they fear that stablecoins will erode their deposit share and massive user base, thereby threatening their industry position and survival space. For the crypto industry, finding a path of harmonious coexistence with traditional banking to introduce the massive liquidity of traditional financial markets has become one of the few "lifelines."

The truth of the matter is that perhaps this war of opposition between the two does not exist. As Noah Levine, a partner at a16z Crypto, stated: "Just like the 'Javon's Paradox' that once existed between ATMs and bank tellers, the development of the crypto industry may help traditional banking find a new path forward." Odaily has specially compiled his long-form article below, offering readers perspectives from both the supply and demand sides to re-examine this industry contradiction.

The "Jevons Paradox" Sweeping the Financial Industry: The Machine That "Stole Jobs" Ultimately Created More Employment

(According to previous assumptions), bank tellers should have been replaced by ATMs.

In reality? ATMs drastically reduced the operating costs of bank branches, leading banks to open more branches. Over forty years, the number of bank teller positions doubled.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons observed the same pattern in the British coal economy—the more efficient steam engines became, the more coal was consumed, not less, because the applications for coal expanded. This phenomenon was named after him. Today, it is reshaping the financial services industry from both the supply and demand sides.

Supply Side: The Collapse and Rebuilding of Infrastructure

To operate its business in the United States, Venmo needed five banking partners, licenses in 49 states, and middleware connecting over 12,000 financial institutions—and it could only be used in one country.

Every major market requires its own self-built system: some rely on government-led channels like PIX and UPI; others leverage private internet platforms like M-Pesa and Alipay. Currently, about 80 countries worldwide have real-time payment systems, but they are almost entirely disconnected from each other.

The root cause of the regionalization dilemma in the fintech industry lies in each independent market having its own payment channels, banking APIs, and compliance license barriers.

Blockchain replaces this fragmented puzzle with an open ledger, and self-custody wallets eliminate the hassle of finding compliant banking partners market by market. This is precisely why companies like Sling Money can build a global payment product with a team of 23 people and 3 compliance licenses—though currently still limited to about 70 countries with fiat on-ramps. Sling CEO Mike Hudack succinctly stated: "Stablecoins transform payments from a 'pre-funding and reconciliation problem' into an 'interoperability problem.'"

It's not just startups betting on this wave of reform.

Stripe acquired the stablecoin issuance platform Bridge and wallet service provider Privy for $1.1 billion, subsequently launching stablecoin financial accounts in 101 countries, far exceeding its previous market coverage of 46 countries. Notably, the same Bridge infrastructure supports both Sling's virtual accounts and operates within the ecosystem of this giant processing $1.4 trillion in payments annually.

An exporter in Nairobi is a microcosm of this infrastructure: she receives payments from US importers via a virtual dollar account, spends stablecoins linked to a bank card at over 150 million merchants, and earns 4% to 7% yield on idle balances through on-chain lending protocols.

No bank account, no bank.

Three years ago, this was just a vision on a PowerPoint slide; today, every piece is operational, built by different teams, and with increasingly impressive composability.

World Bank data shows about 1.3 billion adults are unbanked—this doesn't mean they don't need financial services, but because the cost of serving them exceeds the revenue service providers can charge. (Odaily Note: This means a low return on investment; the cost of serving one person far exceeds the revenue/profit that person can provide.) The average fee for a $200 remittance to Sub-Saharan Africa can soar to 8.45%, nearly $17—for a family with a monthly income of just $150, this represents a week's worth of food, a child's school fees, or life-saving medicine.

What changes when the cost of transferring money plummets?

Precedents already exist: M-Pesa pushed mobile payment costs in Kenya close to zero, and the country's financial inclusion rate jumped from 27% to 85%. IMF research found this was incremental growth, not a zero-sum game. India's UPI started with near-zero fees, and digital payment transaction volume exploded from 18 million to 228 billion in less than a decade.

This means more service providers, broader markets, and more mature products, because the entry cost has been compressed to the limit.

This is the Jevons Paradox on the supply side.

Cost Side: The Burden of Compliance and the Shared Ledger Solution

Now, look inside banks.

In North America alone, the financial industry spends $61 billion annually on financial crime compliance.

C-suite executives at large banks spend 42% of their time dealing with regulatory matters, and compliance-related employee hours grew by 61% between 2016 and 2023.

In other words, the reality reflected in the data is—banks are no longer "financial institutions that also do compliance," but rather "compliance institutions that also provide financial services."

These expenditures, whether compliance or technology costs, are largely spent on restoring or preserving information that "should never have been lost in the first place."

Step into a bank audit, and you'll see what auditors are really doing: reconciling accounts, verifying if correspondent bank account balances match; navigating the opaque bilateral relationships across three or four intermediary banks to trace a transaction that no single party can clearly identify end-to-end.

(The blockchain industry's) shared ledger directly solves this problem.

When all transacting parties write to the same ledger, the reconciliation step disappears—not because compliance requirements are lowered, but because that ledger information was already there.

JPMorgan's Kinexys platform processes over $2 billion daily and has settled more than $2 trillion since launch. Its core use case is a multinational corporation using JPMorgan in over a dozen markets needing to transfer funds between internal accounts in real-time. Traditional core banking ledgers operate in silos and can only run in batch processes. Kinexys overlays this, making funds programmable, compressing settlement from end-of-day to seconds, and releasing idle funds previously trapped between batch processing intervals. Currently, JPMorgan has begun launching JPM Coin on the Canton Network, with institutions like Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Broadridge announcing participation. Banks may prefer tokenized deposits over stablecoins, but the underlying logic is the same: shared infrastructure eliminates the reconciliation layer.

For the demand side, as the unit cost of compliance falls, institutions can serve more clients and cover more markets in an economically viable way.

Convergence: Two Forces, One Direction

For the banking industry, external entrants are increasing because the original cost barriers are collapsing. Simultaneously, for the many platforms and native forces in the crypto market, internal operational costs are decreasing because infrastructure is continuously upgrading.

As regulatory frameworks like the GENIUS Act and MiCA gradually clarify the rules, the two forces point to the same outcome: more people will gain access to more financial services at lower costs. (Odaily: i.e., so-called "financial inclusion")

In the real world, cloud computing did not (as people once imagined) eliminate data centers but allowed anyone with an API key to tap into its computing power. Now, stablecoins are doing the same to banking: this mature system will not disappear. Instead, it will become part of the infrastructure, allowing others to build more products on top of it.

During the steam revolution, Jevons watched steam engine efficiency improve and coal consumption rise accordingly, calling it a "paradox." In fact, it wasn't a paradox but a pattern: when the unit cost of a foundational service drops low enough, the market doesn't shrink; instead, it reaches everyone previously excluded by the old structural costs.

In 2026, we are about to see just how many people lie behind that boundless market.