Tonight I had late-night snacks with a guy who does cross-border e-commerce, and he complained that it’s too troublesome for clients to pay in Korean won: they have to first exchange for US dollars and then wait two days for the bank transfer. A friend next to me said something that left me speechless: "In this day and age, you still don't use on-chain stablecoin for Settlement?" I went home and did some research, and found out that the driving force behind it is @fraxfinance.

In the past two weeks, Frax has been making big moves: FraxNet has turned into a crypto online banking system, allowing enterprises and applications to settle directly using their own USD-pegged stablecoin; they also partnered with a compliant issuer to use the stablecoin as underlying reserves, enabling one-click issuance of various local fiat stablecoins, with the Korean won stablecoin already running; the core stablecoin has also integrated with privacy pools and multi-chain DeFi pools, boosting both liquidity and privacy.

The tech enthusiast thinks that Frax now resembles a "stablecoin operating system": above are the account and card experiences, below are the chain and stablecoins for settlement. If the next round is indeed on-chain payments and enterprise clearing, then this line is much more solid than casually betting on an L2.