133 posts tagged with "Solana"

Tokenized equities have existed for years. The idea was always obvious: put Apple or Tesla shares on-chain, let anyone in the world trade them 24/7 without a brokerage account. So why, at the start of 2025, did the entire tokenized stock market have fewer than 1,500 holders and under $20 million in value? The answer wasn't technology — it was distribution. On April 30, 2026, Kraken's launch of Crypto + xStocks bundles may have finally solved that problem.

Solana is already the fastest general-purpose blockchain in production. Sub-400 millisecond blocks, theoretical throughput of 65,000 transactions per second, fees measured in fractions of a cent. So why would anyone build a Layer 2 on top of it — and why would Solana's own co-founder invest in one?

That question sits at the heart of SOON, a project that is not really trying to scale Solana. Instead, SOON is trying to export Solana's engine to every chain on earth.

On March 31, 2026, Google Quantum AI published a paper with an alarming conclusion: a future quantum computer could break Bitcoin's 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits — and do it in roughly nine minutes. That timeline shrinks every quarter. Within days, Algorand surged 50% as markets repriced the quantum-resistant narrative. Then on May 2, 2026, two developments landed almost simultaneously: Sui began running a working post-quantum stateless signature implementation on testnet, and Solana's Anza and Firedancer validator clients shipped Falcon-512 signature verification, prompting Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko to warn Ethereum L2 users to "abandon all hope" on quantum safety.

The cryptographic arms race that security researchers have been predicting for years is no longer theoretical. It is live, on testnet, and reshaping how blockchains think about their survival timelines.

Your AI agent just placed an order — and it paid the bill itself.

On May 6, 2026, the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud jointly launched Pay.sh, a stablecoin payment gateway that lets autonomous AI agents discover, access, and pay-per-call for APIs — including Google Cloud's own Gemini, BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Cloud Run — without a credit card, a subscription, or a human ever touching the transaction. Within hours, more than 75 API providers had joined the marketplace. The agent economy had its first real checkout counter.

This is more than a product launch. It is the opening move in a race to become the default payment rail for what Solana Foundation president Lily Liu calls the "AI machine economy" — a world where AI agents transact with machines millions of times per day and human billing infrastructure is structurally incapable of keeping up.

On May 6, 2026, Morgan Stanley quietly priced the future of retail crypto trading at 50 basis points. The number sounds small. The implication is anything but.

That morning, E*Trade — the online brokerage Morgan Stanley acquired in 2020 — flipped on a spot crypto pilot for select clients. Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana now sit beside stocks and ETFs inside the same brokerage dashboard. Zerohash handles liquidity, custody, and settlement in the background. The fee: 0.50% per transaction, undercutting Coinbase (60 bps standard, up to 4% retail), Robinhood (up to 95 bps), and Charles Schwab (75 bps) in a single move. Within months, the rollout is set to reach all 8.6 million E*Trade accounts.

Crypto Twitter is treating this as one more TradFi launch. It is not. This is the moment a wirehouse-tier wealth manager priced spot crypto as a stocks-and-bonds adjacent product — and crypto-native exchanges lost the right to charge a "specialist" premium.

The Pilot, in Plain Numbers​

The mechanics of the launch are simpler than the strategic shock.

• Effective date: May 6, 2026, in pilot. Full rollout to all 8.6 million E*Trade clients targeted by end of 2026.
• Assets at launch: BTC, ETH, SOL — direct ownership, not synthetic exposure.
• Fee: 50 bps (0.50%) on the dollar value of each trade.
• Infrastructure: Zerohash for liquidity, custody, and transaction settlement.
• Surface: Native to the existing E*Trade web and mobile dashboard — no separate wallet, no new login, no app switch.

The unusual move is integration, not enablement. E*Trade clients have been able to buy spot Bitcoin ETFs since January 2024, and Morgan Stanley's own MSBT Bitcoin Trust ETF launched on April 8, 2026 with the lowest expense ratio in the U.S. at 0.14%. What changed on May 6 is that crypto stopped being a wrapped product on the brokerage screen. It became a column in the same balance sheet.

The 50-bps Compression, Decoded​

Pricing crypto at 50 bps does three things at once.

First, it undercuts every direct retail competitor. Robinhood made roughly $901 million in crypto transaction revenue in 2025, about 20% of its annual net revenue. Coinbase pulled in $3.32 billion in consumer transaction revenue the same year. Schwab launched spot BTC and ETH trading earlier in 2026 at 75 bps. Morgan Stanley priced the new entrant tier 25 bps below the cheapest brokerage and roughly 10 bps below Coinbase's standard retail tier — and well below the blended retail take-rate Coinbase actually realizes once spreads and tier mix are included.

Second, it implicitly reclassifies crypto. Equity commissions in the U.S. went from quarter-point fixed rates in the 1970s to literal zero in 2019. Crypto skipped that arc and started near 1% — the "crypto exchange premium" that funded Coinbase's, Kraken's, and Gemini's P&Ls for a decade. Morgan Stanley's 50 bps is the first wirehouse signal that BTC, ETH, and SOL deserve a fee schedule that looks more like a 1990s online broker than a specialty trading venue.

Third, it sets a Wall Street ceiling. Schwab built its brand on aggressive price compression — it drove stock commissions to zero in October 2019, and Robinhood beat it there earlier. With Morgan Stanley publicly pricing at 50 bps and 8.6 million eligible accounts inbound, every retail competitor faces a familiar choice: match, justify, or lose.

A May Day Moment, Not a Product Launch​

To see why this is structural, look at three precedent fee-disruption events in U.S. financial history. Each looked like a small pricing tweak when it happened. Each redrew the industry within a decade.

Schwab, 1975. The SEC abolished fixed brokerage commissions on May 1 — known on Wall Street as "May Day." Charles Schwab launched a discount brokerage three weeks later. By the early 1990s, the retail brokerage business had been recapitalized around volume rather than commissions, and full-service firms were forced to redefine their value as advice and research, not access.

Vanguard, 1976. Jack Bogle's First Index Investment Trust launched at fees an order of magnitude below active mutual funds. It was widely mocked at launch ("Bogle's folly"). Forty years later, indexing was the dominant flow story in asset management and the fee structure of active management had been gutted by ETF competition.

Robinhood, 2014. Zero-commission retail equity trading was treated as a marketing gimmick. By October 2019, Schwab, Fidelity, E*Trade, and TD Ameritrade had all matched. The dollar margin per trade collapsed to near zero, and the industry refinanced its economics around payment for order flow, securities lending, and net interest margin.

In each case, the disruption did not arrive when the cheaper option launched. It arrived when an incumbent of unimpeachable credibility validated the new pricing — Schwab in 1975, Vanguard in 1976, Schwab again in 2019. Morgan Stanley pricing crypto at 50 bps in 2026 is that validation event for digital asset trading. As one ETF analyst noted, "By the time the dust settles it'll be pretty dirt cheap to trade crypto everywhere — just like we saw with BTC ETF expense ratios prior to launch."

The Vertical Stack TradFi Now Owns​

The fee story is the headline. The bigger story is the stack Morgan Stanley just completed.

For the first time, a tier-one Wall Street firm offers BTC, ETH, and SOL exposure across all three retail formats simultaneously:

1. ETF wrap. MSBT (Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust) launched April 8, 2026 at 0.14% expense ratio — the lowest in the market. It crossed $100 million in AUM in its first week and ran past $190 million within two weeks. Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas projects $5 billion in first-year AUM as the wealth-management advisor channel turns on.
2. Brokerage-direct. E*Trade now offers direct spot trading at 50 bps, integrated into the same dashboard as the ETF. A client can buy MSBT and SOL on the same screen, in the same session.
3. Advisor-allocated. Roughly 16,000 in-house Morgan Stanley advisors oversee about $9.3 trillion in client assets. Morgan Stanley's IRA business alone crossed $1 trillion in March 2026, growing 15.8% annually since 2022. Those advisors now have a vetted, in-house product menu for crypto allocation across managed accounts.

No crypto-native firm — not Coinbase, not Kraken, not Gemini — owns all three layers at this scale. Coinbase has the brokerage and an institutional prime business. It does not have a wirehouse-tier wealth advisor channel with $9 trillion of allocated capital sitting on the other side. Schwab has all three layers but is a quarter behind on launch and 25 bps higher on fees.

What 8.6 Million Accounts Actually Means​

Headlines focus on the user count. The capital flow read-through is more interesting.

E*Trade's 8.6 million retail accounts represent roughly $360 billion in client assets, based on E*Trade's most recent disclosed averages. Even modest allocation drift moves real money:

• A 1% rotation into crypto = ~$3.6 billion in incremental TradFi-channel buying.
• A 2% rotation — the threshold often cited by ETF analysts as plausible across Morgan Stanley's full client base — would push that figure into the high tens of billions across both the ETF and direct trading channels.
• None of that flow goes through Coinbase. It clears via Zerohash and lands in spot BTC, ETH, and SOL inventory the brokerage holds on behalf of clients.

For context, Coinbase's $3.32 billion in 2025 consumer transaction revenue was generated against trading volumes in the high hundreds of billions. A multi-billion-dollar inflow that bypasses Coinbase entirely is a structural P&L event, not a marketing nuisance.

What Crypto-Native Exchanges Do Next​

Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken now face a strategy fork that mirrors the 2019 retail-equity inflection.

Path 1: Compress fees. Match Morgan Stanley's 50 bps for spot BTC, ETH, and SOL across retail. Fund the lost revenue with derivatives, staking, subscription products (Coinbase One), payment for order flow analogs, and stablecoin float — exactly the playbook retail equity brokers ran after 2019. This protects volume share but durably re-rates the equity story.

Path 2: Differentiate up the stack. Concede the high-volume, low-touch BTC/ETH/SOL spot tier to TradFi at 50 bps and compete on what wirehouses cannot offer: perpetual futures, on-chain DeFi access, staking optimization, long-tail token listings, advanced order types, prediction markets, and 24/7 settlement. This is the crypto-native moat — but it requires accepting that the entry-level retail business is a commodity now.

Path 3: Both. Most likely, in practice. The post-2019 playbook for U.S. retail brokers was zero-commission core trading + monetization elsewhere. Expect a similar split for crypto-native venues by EOY 2026: 0.50% (or less) standard spot retail tier on majors + premium economics on derivatives, staking, and on-chain product surfaces.

The Settlement-Layer Read-Through​

The compression has a less obvious second-order effect: it changes the shape of order flow infrastructure has to handle.

TradFi-channel crypto trades are not 24/7 DeFi traffic. They concentrate during U.S. market hours, cluster around macro releases and equity opens, settle through a small number of regulated intermediaries (Zerohash, Anchorage, BitGo), and demand uptime characteristics that match equities clearing — not retail crypto exchanges. They also lean heavily on the major chains: BTC, ETH, and SOL at launch, with stablecoin rails for funding and unwind.

For node and RPC operators, this is a meaningful workload shift. As wirehouse and brokerage flow scales, the traffic profile pulls toward predictable, high-reliability reads against canonical state during business-hours windows — not the bursty, latency-tolerant patterns common in DeFi. Settlement reliability and historical state access become more valuable than raw transaction throughput. The chains that hold up under this kind of TradFi-grade load are the chains that get included in the next wave of brokerage launches.

BlockEden.xyz operates production-grade RPC and indexing infrastructure for the chains TradFi is buying — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and beyond. If you're building or operating settlement, custody, or analytics layers that need to hold up under wirehouse-scale traffic, explore our API marketplace to access the kind of reliability institutional flow demands.

The Bottom Line​

Pricing is a story crypto has consistently underestimated. The industry watched ETF expense ratios race to the floor in early 2024 and assumed spot-trading fees would stay structurally higher because crypto-native exchanges had unique value. May 6, 2026 is the day that assumption broke.

Morgan Stanley did not just launch a product. It set a 50-basis-point ceiling that competitors will spend the rest of 2026 either matching or rationalizing. The real question is no longer whether Coinbase compresses. It is whether the next wave of TradFi launches — Goldman, JPMorgan's wealth channel, Merrill — anchors at 50 bps or finds a way to push lower, the way Schwab has historically done with every fee floor it has ever inherited.

Crypto's exchange-fee era is ending. The settlement-and-services era is beginning. The firms that win the next cycle will be the ones that figured that out on May 7, not in 2027.

Western Union sent its first international wire in 1851. On May 4, 2026, it announced its first stablecoin — and it isn't running on Ethereum, it isn't backed by a bank consortium, and it isn't a clone of PYUSD. It's USDPT, a US dollar-pegged token issued by Anchorage Digital Bank and minted on Solana, the chain that processed $650 billion in stablecoin transactions in a single month earlier this year. For a company that built its empire on the premise that moving money across borders takes time and costs money, the choice to settle on a network with sub-cent fees and 400-millisecond finality is not an experiment. It's a confession.

The launch lands inside the most compressed 30-day window of TradFi-to-stablecoin migration the industry has ever seen. Visa added five new blockchains to its settlement pilot on April 29. Meta restarted stablecoin payouts to creators the same day, routed through Stripe's Bridge acquisition. Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks dropped final compromise language on the GENIUS Act yield rules on May 2, unblocking the path to federally regulated stablecoin issuance. And then Western Union — the company that owns the largest physical agent network on Earth — picked Solana as the rail under all of it.

Stablecoin payments just stopped being a crypto-native experiment. They became default infrastructure.

Why USDPT Is Structurally Different From Every Stablecoin Before It​

There are now hundreds of dollar-backed tokens, and most of them solve the wrong problem. Circle's USDC is dominant in DeFi but has no last-mile cash-out network. PayPal's PYUSD has $4.5 billion in float but exists primarily inside PayPal's wallet stack. Bank-issued tokens settle institutional flows but never touch a remittance corridor. USDPT is the first stablecoin where the issuer's existing distribution network is the on-ramp and off-ramp.

Consider the asymmetry. Western Union processes roughly $300 billion per year in cross-border wire volume across more than 200 countries. It operates more than 550,000 retail agent locations, many of them in markets where bank penetration is below 30 percent and where the only realistic way to convert digital dollars into local cash is to walk into a corner store. No DeFi protocol can rebuild that. No fintech can acquire it. It took 175 years.

Layer USDPT on top of that footprint and the math changes. A migrant worker in Manila who wants to receive remittances no longer needs SWIFT-routed correspondent banking, two-day settlement, or a 6 percent foreign exchange spread. Their Bolivia-based cousin sends USDPT on Solana. It clears in under a second. The recipient walks to a Western Union agent and converts to pesos at a regulated rate, or holds the dollars on a Stable by Western Union card and spends them directly at a Mastercard merchant. The blockchain disappears into the user experience.

Anchorage Digital Bank — the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States — issues the token. Fireblocks runs the institutional settlement infrastructure. Solana provides the rails. Western Union provides the customers. That's a stack no competitor can replicate without spending a decade and tens of billions building physical distribution.

The Solana Thesis Just Got Validated by the World's Oldest Money Mover​

For two years, Solana Foundation president Lily Liu has argued that Solana's structural advantage isn't DeFi — it's payments. Throughput, finality, and fees, in that order. Ethereum lost the institutional payment vertical somewhere between gas spikes and L2 fragmentation, and Solana quietly built the alternative.

The 2026 numbers make her case. Solana's quarterly stablecoin transfer volume now exceeds $2 trillion. Median fees sit around $0.00064 — well under one cent on transactions of any size. Block confirmations land between 395 and 500 milliseconds. In February 2026 alone, the network cleared $650 billion in stablecoin transactions, a single-month record that exceeds the GDP of most countries.

Western Union joining Visa, Mastercard, Worldpay, Singapore Gulf Bank, Stripe, Meta, and Fiserv as institutional users of Solana stablecoin rails is no longer a coincidence. It's a pattern. When a 175-year-old SWIFT customer chooses to bypass SWIFT, when a credit card network chooses to settle in USDC instead of dollars, when the world's largest social media company starts paying creators in tokens — the chain underneath each of those decisions has become Solana.

CEO Devin McGranahan was direct on the earnings call: USDPT is meant to operate as an alternative to the SWIFT interbank network for Western Union's own internal flows. The company plans to use the token first for treasury and agent settlement, replacing the idle pre-funded balances it currently parks in correspondent banks around the world. By moving to 24/7 on-chain settlement, Western Union expects to redeploy hundreds of millions of dollars of trapped working capital into more productive use. Then, in phase two, the rails open to consumers.

Stable by Western Union: Where the Card Network Meets the Chain​

The consumer product is where USDPT stops being plumbing and starts being a competitive weapon. Stable by Western Union is a stablecoin-backed spend product launching across more than 40 countries throughout 2026, with the initial pilot live in Bolivia and the Philippines — two of the most inflation-sensitive markets where Western Union already dominates inbound remittance flow.

The pitch to a recipient is simple. Hold dollars instead of bolivianos or pesos. Spend them at any Mastercard or Visa merchant globally. Get paid in USDPT, hold the value, and never get hit by a 30 percent annualized currency depreciation again. For consumers in countries where local currencies have lost purchasing power year after year, that proposition is closer to a savings account than a payment card.

This is also where the Visa announcement from April 29 becomes load-bearing. Visa added Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc, and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing the total to nine blockchains. Its annualized stablecoin settlement run rate hit $7 billion, up 50 percent quarter-over-quarter. The card network is no longer asking whether stablecoins belong in its rails. It's racing to add chains fast enough to match issuer demand.

When a Stable by Western Union cardholder swipes at a merchant in Lima, the merchant gets paid in soles. The acquirer gets paid in dollars. Visa or Mastercard settles with the issuer in USDPT on Solana. The recipient never sees the chain. The merchant never sees the chain. The chain disappears entirely behind the card network, and that is precisely the point. Stablecoins win not when consumers know they're using crypto — they win when they don't.

The GENIUS Act Timing Is Not an Accident​

Western Union didn't pick May 2026 by chance. The GENIUS Act, signed into law July 18, 2025, established three categories of permitted payment stablecoin issuers: subsidiaries of insured depository institutions, federal qualified issuers, and state qualified issuers. For nearly a year, an unresolved fight over yield-bearing stablecoins kept the broader CLARITY Act stuck in the Senate Banking Committee. On May 2, 2026, Tillis and Alsobrooks released compromise language that bars crypto firms from offering rewards "economically or functionally equivalent" to interest on bank deposits, while preserving activity-based rewards tied to genuine platform usage.

That deal cleared the last political roadblock to federally chartered stablecoin issuance at scale. Western Union, by routing USDPT through Anchorage Digital Bank — already a federally chartered OCC-regulated entity — positioned itself to be one of the first non-bank, federally-compliant stablecoin issuers in the United States. Not a money transmitter wrapping a third-party token. The issuer.

The implication for the competitive set is severe. Tether operates offshore. Circle is regulated but not federally chartered as a bank. Bank-issued stablecoins from JPMorgan and Citi serve institutional desks, not consumer remittance flows. USDPT slots into a regulatory gap that almost no competitor can fill, because almost no competitor combines federal banking compliance with retail consumer distribution at planetary scale.

If even 5 percent of Western Union's annual cross-border volume migrates to USDPT in the first 18 months — a conservative ramp by stablecoin standards — the token would compound to a $10 to $15 billion float. That would put it ahead of PYUSD, behind USDC, and ahead of every bank-issued stablecoin attempt that has ever launched in the United States. All from a company that has not been described as innovative in living memory.

What This Means for the Infrastructure Layer​

The chain-builder reading this should notice something specific. Solana RPC traffic shape is about to change. DeFi flows are bursty, gas-driven, and concentrated in trading hours on the Eastern US time zone. Remittance flows are the opposite — globally distributed, time-zone-smoothed, dominated by predictable batching windows aligned with paychecks and transfer days in dozens of corridors. They are also far more sensitive to uptime SLAs than to peak throughput.

A USDPT-driven workload on Solana skews toward high-frequency, geographically-distributed last-mile reads — wallet balance checks, agent reconciliation queries, settlement confirmations. It looks more like a CDN's load profile than a DEX's. Builders providing Solana infrastructure to enterprises that look like Western Union, Visa, Stripe, or Meta will be selling 99.99 percent uptime guarantees, regional read-replica latency budgets, and signed-attestation-based audit trails — not transaction inclusion guarantees during MEV congestion.

That's a different business than serving DeFi. And the next 24 months of stablecoin volume growth will go disproportionately to the infrastructure providers that figure out which one they're building.

BlockEden.xyz operates institutional-grade Solana RPC infrastructure with multi-region redundancy and uptime SLAs designed for enterprise payment workloads. Explore our Solana API services to build on the same rails the world's largest payments incumbents are now adopting.

The Confession Inside the Press Release​

Strip away the language about "regulated digital infrastructure" and "operational efficiency," and Western Union's USDPT launch is a single, very loud admission: SWIFT-based correspondent banking was the wrong technology for cross-border money movement, and it has been the wrong technology for at least a decade. Nobody inside the wire transfer industry could say so out loud, because saying so would invite the question of why Western Union, MoneyGram, and every correspondent bank in the world have been charging consumers six percent to wait three days for what a Solana validator now does in 400 milliseconds for a fraction of a cent.

The answer, of course, is that they couldn't. They didn't have the rails. Now they do. And the company that built the largest analog distribution network in human financial history just signaled that the digital rails it ran on for 175 years are no longer fit for purpose.

Stablecoins did not crash through Western Union's gate. Western Union opened it from the inside. The next dozen incumbents are watching, calculating their own ramps, and counting the months until they have to follow.

The TradFi-to-crypto migration was supposed to take a decade. It is going to happen in 2026.

Sources​

• Western Union Launches USDPT on Solana — Investor Press Release
• Western Union's Solana-based stablecoin could reshape its payment model — CoinDesk
• Western Union Launches USDPT Stablecoin on Solana via Anchorage Digital — Decrypt
• Western Union eyeing stablecoin launch to settle global transactions without SWIFT — CoinDesk
• Visa Accelerates Stablecoin Momentum: Adding Five Blockchains for Settlement — Visa Newsroom
• Visa adds Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc and Tempo to stablecoin settlement program — Decrypt
• Meta launches USDC stablecoin payouts for creators in Colombia and the Philippines — Bitcoin.com News
• Meta starts stablecoin payouts to creators in Circle's USDC via Stripe — CoinDesk
• Tillis and Alsobrooks Strike Stablecoin Yield Deal, Reviving CLARITY Act Push — CoinInsider
• GENIUS Act — Wikipedia
• Lily Liu says Solana is building payment rails for the AI machine economy — CoinDesk

Carrot Protocol never got hacked. Its smart contracts were not compromised, its admin keys were not phished, and its team did not rug. Yet on April 30, 2026, the Solana yield aggregator told its users to withdraw everything by May 14 because half of its TVL had vanished into someone else's exploit.

That "someone else" was Drift Protocol, the perpetual futures venue that lost roughly $285 million on April 1 to what investigators believe was a North Korea-linked durable-nonce attack. Carrot's Boost and Turbo products had been quietly routing user deposits through Drift-integrated vaults. When Drift bled, Carrot bled. About $8 million of Carrot's roughly $16 million in deposits at the time were drained downstream — 50% of TVL gone overnight, with no mistake of Carrot's own.

Thirty days later, Carrot is the first protocol to formally shut down because of that exposure. It will almost certainly not be the last. Its closure is the moment the DeFi industry can no longer hand-wave away the question that has been sitting under the surface since 2020: when "money LEGOs" snap together, who owns the failure when one block underneath gives way?

On April 9, 2026, Jump Crypto opened the largest single-client bug bounty in blockchain history. For the next thirty days, anyone in the world can take a swing at Firedancer v1 — Solana's first fully independent validator client — for a shot at $1,000,000 in rewards. The competition runs through May 9 on Immunefi, and a single critical-severity bug triggers the entire pool. Even if no one finds anything, $50,000 is set aside as a "participation pot" for the effort.

This is not a marketing exercise. Firedancer v1 is 636,000 lines of hand-written C code that now sits in the consensus path of a network carrying nearly $6 billion in DeFi TVL and $17 billion in stablecoin float. Every byte of it has to be right. The audit competition is the most aggressive public stress test a Layer 1 client team has ever staged — and the results will decide whether Solana finally crosses the multi-client threshold that Ethereum spent half a decade trying to reach.

Four years ago, Meta sold the corpse of its Libra-turned-Diem stablecoin to Silvergate for roughly $200 million and quietly walked away from crypto. On April 29, 2026, the company walked back in — but with no token of its own, no consortium, and no white paper. Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp creators in Colombia and the Philippines simply opened their payout settings and found a new option: get paid in USDC, on Polygon or Solana, directly to a self-custodial wallet they already own.

It is the most consequential thing Meta has done in payments since Diem died, and almost nobody is calling it that.