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)…