We tend to judge payment systems by the metrics we can immediately see and feel, namely speed, fees, convenience and user experience. But according to Joshua Tate, co-founder and CEO of ForumPay, those metrics only reveal part of the story. Beneath every transaction sits an economic structure, which, for decades, has shaped how money moves, and in many ways, why it moves so slowly.
“What many people don’t realize”, Tate says, “is how much banks are actually making simply from the amount of time they hold on to your funds.” It might be a simple observation, but it’s one that skews our perspective of contemporary payment systems. We often assume the financial system is designed to move money as quickly and efficiently as possible. But as Tate argues, delay itself has become part of the business model.
“When I learned the amount of money that banks earn during even the limited time they’re holding your funds during a wire transfer, it completely changed how I viewed the infrastructure,” he explains. “Every second that the bank holds those funds, they’re earning interest on them. So they’re disincentivized to actually move money quickly.”
At an individual level, those delays may appear insignificant, but when inflated to a global scale, the economics become enormous. Across clearing windows, settlement cycles, correspondent banking relationships, and internal processing systems, value is being continuously generated as money remains in transit. The operational friction encountered by consumers is often a byproduct of the way legacy financial institutions derive profit from the very process of moving funds.
That same complexity is built into the architecture behind card payments. Tate recalls one of the moments that most shaped his understanding of the industry: “One of the biggest realizations for me was understanding how many participants are involved in a simple credit card transaction,” he says. The average card payment can involve anywhere between six and nine separate entities before a merchant ultimately receives funds. Issuers, acquirers, processors, gateways, networks, settlement providers and banks all sit within the transaction flow, each introducing additional layers of cost, timing and dependency. “It’s stacks on stacks on stacks,” Tate says.
Over time, those layers became normalized. Financial infrastructure evolved around fragmented systems, delayed settlement and intermediaries that were never truly optimized for transparency or interoperability. Instead, the industry adapted around legacy incentives that rewarded control over the movement of money rather than the efficiency of it. According to Tate, this is exactly what makes blockchain-powered payment infrastructures such a revolutionary innovation.
“Newer payment rails, particularly those built on blockchain systems, reduce the need for extended processing cycles and intermediaries by enabling direct settlement between parties,” he explains. “The result is a system where speed becomes the baseline expectation.”
For Tate, the real significance of crypto payments extends far beyond speculation or digital assets themselves. The larger transformation lies in creating infrastructure that allows different forms of value to become interoperable in real time. “I think there’s a general misunderstanding of the concept of the digitization of the dollar, for example”, he says. “It’s not just about a CBDC or replacing traditional money. It’s about creating a digital representation of assets, be that cash, stocks, equity, crypto, and making them usable.”
ForumPay's design is built upon this very principle. Joshua Tate describes the company not just as a processor for cryptocurrency transactions, but as the infrastructure needed to connect traditional financial systems with digital assets in everyday commercial environments.
“ForumPay essentially has the capability to turn any digital asset into something you can actually use to pay for things every day.” The implications extend well beyond crypto-native consumers. Tate sees a future in which everyday transactions don’t require the cumbersome process of off-ramping investments, transferring capital across banks or enduring lengthy settlement periods. Instead, purchases would be completed with a level of fluidity that traditional financial systems currently lack.
“Imagine not having to liquidate stock in order to buy a house,” he says. “You could convert tokenized stock into cash the same way we turn Bitcoin into cash today.” In that future, payment systems become less dependent on siloed banking infrastructure and more dependent on fluid networks capable of transferring value instantly between different asset classes. “It turns everything into money,” Tate adds.
Stablecoins are already accelerating that transition. Tate argues that the fundamental value of stablecoins lies in their role as efficient settlement infrastructure, rather than in the common public focus on adoption or regulation.“Try and make a wire transfer for $10 million and see how long it takes,” he says. “Then make a $10 million transfer using USDT and see how long that takes.” The difference is significant, and it is structural. “There are numerous examples of how the provision and transfer of funds anywhere in the world is simply more efficient leveraging stablecoins,” he explains.
Tate believes these developments are part of a much broader transition toward global digital financial infrastructure adoption. While he acknowledges that legacy systems won't vanish overnight, he views these current advancements as part of a realignment. “There will still be demand for traditional systems,” he says. “But the dominance will move toward digital infrastructure as Web3 evolves, as AI evolves, and as the broader financial ecosystem becomes more interconnected.”
Under Joshua Tate’s leadership, ForumPay is building the infrastructure needed to integrate digital assets into the very fabric of daily transactions. As businesses, consumers, and digital asset users embrace this evolving ecosystem, ForumPay will provide the means to bridge blockchain-based assets with real-world commerce.
Because, if Tate is right, blockchain’s greatest contribution to payments is not merely faster settlement, but the transformation of value itself into something more fluid, interoperable and seamlessly transferable.
Joshua Tate isn’t one to romanticize entrepreneurship. For the ForumPay co-founder and CEO, building a company was never about startup mythology or chasing the glossy image that often surrounds Silicon Valley success stories. If anything, Tate believes most people misunderstand what building a company actually feels like once you’re inside it. “Any entrepreneur basically comes from a position where they had a fully stable career and realized they wanted to do things differently”, he says.
Tate himself didn’t begin his career in technology or finance. After graduating from the University of Kansas School of Law in 2002, he spent several years practicing law, first as a law clerk and later as an attorney. It was a profession rooted in structure and precision: “What I liked about practicing law was problem solving,” Tate explains. “Someone comes to you with an issue and you’re trained in a certain way to help solve that issue within clearly defined systems.”
But in time, he found himself becoming less interested in resolving isolated issues and more interested in understanding the systems that had created them in the first place. That change in perspective eventually pushed him toward entrepreneurship. In 2010, Tate launched his own real estate firm before transitioning into technology and digital payments in 2017, a move that would ultimately lead to the founding of ForumPay.
“When I moved into entrepreneurship, it became more macro,” he says. “I could see problems that existed on a much larger scale for lots of people, and I felt I had a particular skill set that could help change those systems for the better.” This move changed the nature of Tate’s work. In his view, entrepreneurship is not simply about building products or scaling businesses, rather, it involves deciding that certain systems are flawed and having the conviction to rebuild them into something better.
What remains largely unappreciated at the start of that journey is the sheer uncertainty that typically accompanies such a pivot. “One of the funny realities of being a founder,” Tate says, “is that if you truly understood all the challenges and heartache it was going to take to get there, most people probably wouldn’t do it.”
Part of what allows entrepreneurs to move forward is precisely that lack of complete visibility. Founders operate largely on conviction long before they see a clear path. Decisions are made with incomplete information, and progress tends to arrive through a process of constant recalibration. And, mistakes are inevitable in that process. The difference, he believes, lies in how founders respond. “You’re always going to make mistakes,” he says. “It’s only natural. The important thing is recognizing them, owning them and figuring out how not to repeat them.”
That mindset becomes increasingly important as companies begin to grow. In the earliest stages of a business, founders are involved in nearly everything. They move constantly between roles, often acting as strategist, salesperson, operator and problem solver simultaneously. Those early years shape the mentality many carry into leadership later on.
That initial level of involvement creates a necessary intensity, but it can also create its own set of limitations. The very instincts that help founders build a company from the ground up can eventually become obstacles as the business begins to scale. Ultimately, growth requires founders to stop measuring success by the breadth of their personal control.
“The real transition is finding people who can do things exceptionally better than you ever could.” For many entrepreneurs, that can be an uncomfortable realization. It requires letting go of control and building teams capable of operating independently. Tate credits much of his perspective on leadership to mentors who have emphasized exactly that principle. “If I’m really good at one thing,” he recalls from a conversation with longtime mentor William Erby, “it’s finding people who can do things far better than I ever could have.”
It is an idea that now informs how he approaches leadership at ForumPay; long-term success depends on creating systems and teams capable of evolving beyond the founder themselves. The challenge today is learning how to balance long-term vision with the discipline required to execute consistently as the company scales. “My mentor always used to say, ‘Look afar to see the end from the beginning,’” he explains. “But at the same time, you have to operate with incredible discipline in the execution along the way.”
This philosophy has helped shape ForumPay's growth within an industry that is itself in a state of constant, rapid evolution. While the digital asset space has navigated years of volatility, skepticism, and structural uncertainty, Tate maintains that founders in emerging sectors cannot wait for the fog to lift before they begin the work of building.
"There is no industry where the future is completely certain," he observes. "What matters is believing that what you’re building genuinely improves systems and continuing to push forward with that vision." Under Tate’s direction, ForumPay has anchored itself to the conviction that digital assets and traditional finance are destined for deeper interconnection. In his view, the infrastructure capable of bridging these two worlds will serve as a critical catalyst as global adoption continues to advance.
For Tate, however, the deeper lesson behind entrepreneurship has little to do with startup culture, funding rounds or public perception. Building a company ultimately forces people to become comfortable operating without certainty while continuing to move forward anyway.
Eventually, successful founders stop attempting to eliminate uncertainty entirely and instead master the art of navigating it. The work becomes less about controlling every individual outcome and more about building something resilient enough to evolve on its own over time. It is rarely the version of entrepreneurship visible to the outside world. But for Tate, that very uncertainty is precisely where the substantive work of building something meaningful truly begins.
The cultural shorthand for entrepreneurship is a story of clean lines and grand successes. In the popular imagination, founders are often cast as visionaries of the digital age trailing multibillion-dollar valuations, while consumers are conditioned to look at the architecture of the finished product rather than the structural failures that almost brought it crashing down during construction.
Building a company is an act of exposure; a state of permanent precarity. Risk is not a hurdle to be cleared but the very atmosphere founders breathe. Stripped of its Silicon Valley gloss, being a founder is an exercise in surrendering stability. It’s a choice to trade a predictable career path for a high-stakes gamble on a very specific vision, with no assurance that the market, or culture, will offer a return on your investment.
Ultimately, the distinction is intent. Founders are not just optimizing systems or scaling operations; they are making a conviction-driven bet that the world would be a better place if certain aspects worked differently.
Stepping into entrepreneurship often means asking, is the goal solving a problem, or changing the system that creates it? My early career in law involved solving specific problems within an established structure, and operating inside the system, instead of against it. A client presented a case and my role was to apply a structured, precise skill set to resolve it. It was a framework with boundaries.
The limitation is that those boundaries rarely get questioned. The move toward entrepreneurship came from recognizing that big-issue problems weren’t isolated, they were systemic. Addressing one-off issues doesn’t create real change at scale. Addressing one-off issues doesn’t change much at scale. The real leverage comes from identifying patterns that affect large groups of people and figuring out how to approach them differently.
It’s more than a philosophical pivot; it completely changes the nature of the work. You’re no longer solving problems within a system. You’re questioning whether the system works at all, and if not, what it should look like instead.
One of the less discussed advantages founders have at the beginning is that they don’t fully understand what they’re getting themselves into. Not yet knowing what the next years or decades will involve, allows them to stay focused on their vision. I’m sure that if all of the setbacks and complications were clear from day one, most entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t move forward.
But founders operate on conviction. The journey reveals itself incrementally and progress is rarely linear, rather, it’s a craft of constant recalibration. Every decision is based on incomplete information, and inevitably, some of those choices will prove flawed. Far from proving failure, this fallibility is a natural and necessary part of the process. Eventually, a definitive pattern emerges. Founders who manage to sustain progress are not those who avoid error, which is impossible, but those who confront them head on in a bid to reach their end goal.
In the early stages of a startup, founders take on the role of designer, builder, and office manager, often all in one morning. It is this early involvement in the day-to-day details of the business that shapes how they lead the company later on. Companies led directly by their founders often have a unique energy. Because they have done every task themselves, founders know exactly how things should be done, which often means they have very little patience for poor performance.
But doing everything themselves eventually becomes a problem, and as the business expands, founders must change their mindset. The focus changes from doing the work to finding the right people, and oftentimes, hiring experts who can do the job better than they did. This requires letting go of control, setting aside one's ego, and building a culture where others can work independently. It’s the most critical point in a company's growth.
The founders who succeed in this transition are those who realize that the true success of an idea is its ability to thrive, even when they aren't there.
It’s easy to overlook infrastructure companies. The often unsung, often invisible systems beneath the flashy consumer apps and brands that capture all the attention. Few people consider the immense coordination required to move information, value, or assets from point A to point B. That tends to change once an industry starts evolving faster than the infrastructure built to support it. One thing I’ve learned through building ForumPay is that infrastructure companies often end up becoming more relevant than anyone originally expected, including the founders themselves. What starts as a solution to one problem can eventually find itself at the heart of a much broader structural transformation that reshapes an entire industry. You can see that happening now across artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors, payments, and digital finance. Regarding the latter, for example, I believe the future will be more focused on allowing different forms of value to move more fluidly across the same infrastructure, thereby connecting diverse financial systems in one network.
But as infrastructure companies go, they are often underestimated precisely because this expansion is gradual, and their potential is revealed over time. By that point, the infrastructure is, in many ways, setting a path for where the industry goes next.
Infrastructure has a habit of outgrowing its original purpose. What begins as a tool for one market often becomes the building blocks for something much larger once technology and user behavior catch up to it. Take Nvidia, for example. Nvidia started out as a company associated primarily with graphics processing and gaming hardware in the early 1990s.
Few would have predicted that the same chip architecture would mark a turning point in the history of computing, eventually becoming the basis for artificial intelligence, cloud computing and large-scale data processing. The infrastructure became drastically more valuable as different industries began depending on it in entirely new ways. In the words of Jensen Huang, “NVIDIA is no longer just a tech company. We are an essential infrastructure company.”
I see similar things happening with ForumPay. When we first launched, the focus was largely centered around crypto payments and connecting digital assets to existing payment systems. But I’m realizing that it is likely to become more about full interoperability between different forms of value.
Years ago, the idea that someone could use Bitcoin, stablecoins, digital dollars, or tokenized equities through connected transactional infrastructure was completely abstract. But it’s starting to look increasingly inevitable. Sometimes, you start solving one problem only to realize you’re building the bedrock for something else.
Financial systems have been layered together over decades in the same way as old cities: new roads built over older roads, temporary fixes becoming permanent, complexity accumulating faster than anyone intended. Most consumers never see that complexity because the front-end is designed to feel simple.
But behind even a standard credit card transaction sits an enormous amount of coordination between issuers, acquirers, processors, settlement networks, fraud systems, banks, and various third parties. Depending on how you measure it, there can be six to nine participants involved simply to get a merchant paid. It becomes stacks on stacks on stacks of infrastructure layered on top of earlier infrastructure.
The challenge is that these systems were built for a very different pace of commerce. Digital behavior is accelerating, and the infrastructure it’s built on is beginning to show its age. Companies operating in this space either continue evolving or eventually lose relevance to faster technology and more adaptive competitors.
That’s one of the reasons I became increasingly interested in infrastructure problems at the macro level. You start seeing how inefficiencies can be embedded across entire networks, not isolated within one product or company. Solving those kinds of problems requires rebuilding the underlying architecture itself.
Building infrastructure companies requires a different mindset from businesses driven by short-term visibility or consumer hype. Most infrastructure companies spend years operating in the shadows before the market fully understands their importance.
During that time, founders are often forced to develop an unusually deep operational understanding of the business because, in the early stages, they end up doing almost every job themselves. That becomes part of the culture of infrastructure companies. You understand the dependencies, the points of failure, the operational friction, and the consequences when systems break because you’ve spent time inside every layer of the process while building it.
At the same time, infrastructure forces a certain amount of humility onto founders whether they like it or not. The systems become too complex to scale without exceptional people around you, often people capable of doing certain parts of the business far better than you ever could. It also forces you to become comfortable with uncertainty.
There is no industry where the future is certain, particularly in emerging areas like digital assets and Fintech. Most of the time, you’re building long before markets fully understand why it matters. Mistakes are unavoidable in that environment. But the important thing is recognizing them early, adapting, and continuing without letting ego interfere with the process.
There is a tendency, particularly in modern business culture, to separate vision from execution, as though one belongs to the realm of ideas and the other to operations. But the longer you spend building companies, especially in industries defined by uncertainty and rapid technological change, the more artificial that distinction begins to feel. The founders who endure are rarely the ones with the grandest ambitions alone, nor are they simply the most operationally efficient. More often, they are the people capable of holding two competing realities at the same time: the necessity of thinking years ahead while remaining disciplined enough to execute relentlessly in the present. Vision without execution quickly becomes abstraction. Execution without vision eventually loses direction.
One piece of advice that has stayed with me throughout my career came from my longtime mentor, William “Bill” Erby, who once said: “Look afar to see the end from the beginning.” As my career has progressed, the more I’ve come to understand that leadership is ultimately the discipline of balancing those two responsibilities at once: keeping your eyes fixed on the horizon while remaining intensely focused on the execution required to reach it.
One of the more difficult realities of building companies in emerging industries is that conviction almost always has to arrive before certainty does. Markets rarely announce where they are headed in advance, and technological shifts (at least the meaningful ones) tend to appear speculative or even unserious until they become unavoidable. That has been especially true within digital assets and payments infrastructure, where much of the conversation over the past decade has oscillated between enthusiasm and skepticism, often depending less on the underlying technology itself than on the broader economic or political climate of the time.
I believe there is no industry where the future is certain. The question is not whether ambiguity exists (it always does) but whether you possess enough conviction in the problem you are solving to continue building while the rest of the market is still deciding what it believes. For us at ForumPay, that meant believing early that payments infrastructure would inevitably move toward more open, digital, and interoperable systems, even during periods when much of the industry itself remained fragmented or uncertain.
Vision, by itself, has never been enough. One of the easier mistakes leaders can make is confusing ambition with progress, particularly in industries where ideas tend to attract more attention than infrastructure. The reality is that enduring companies are usually built through operational discipline sustained over long periods of time. In payments infrastructure, much of that work is neither visible nor especially glamorous. It involves security, compliance, partnerships, scalability, and thousands of smaller decisions that determine whether a system can function reliably at scale.
That is why execution matters as much as vision itself. You have to operate with discipline and consistency along the way, because even the strongest long-term strategy means very little without the ability to repeatedly execute against it. At the same time, execution cannot become static. Fundamentals have to be sound first, but companies that fail to continue evolving eventually get lapped.
One of the more overlooked realities of leadership is that no company scales through the vision of a single individual alone. Founders may establish direction early, but enduring organizations are built by teams capable of evolving alongside the industries they operate within.
That becomes especially important in fast-moving sectors, where technologies and markets rarely remain static for very long. Companies that survive are not necessarily the ones that avoid mistakes altogether, but the ones capable of adapting quickly enough to learn from them before the market moves on.
For me, much of that comes down to surrounding yourself with exceptionally talented people and being willing to listen to them. Strong founders understand that growth eventually requires finding people who can do things exceptionally better than you can. At a certain point, adaptability stops being a competitive advantage and simply becomes a condition for survival.
In the vast sea of business literature, most books are ephemeral, disappearing from memory almost as quickly as they were bound. But a rare few endure. These are not the books that offer the comfort of definitive answers, but that instead provoke thought and reflection. They may reshape our very understanding of leadership, ambition, and the profound responsibility that comes with building something that may, hopefully, outlast its creator. Over the decades, while many titles have faded into obsolescence, there are three books in particular that continue to resonate with me, offering lessons on leadership, culture and the arduous labor of innovation.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged remains one of the most influential and debated books in modern business literature. While a great deal of attention is often given to its political themes, the idea that anchored itself in my mind was far simpler: progress depends on people willing to create. The protagonists of Rand’s narrative are not characterised by rank, but by their capacity to build, to pioneer, and to solve problems where others see obstacles.
That principle serves as a cornerstone for entrepreneurship. Every founder begins with the profound conviction that an existing paradigm, be that a tangible product, or an intangible service or system, can be improved. Long before any external validation, these creators dedicate themselves to the grueling job of transmuting a mental abstraction into a reality.
My personal takeaway from Atlas Shrugged was not ideological, but practical. Meaningful progress is seldom the product of collective agreement. Rather, it starts with a will to accept the task, and responsibility, of creating something that does not yet exist, and maintaining the tenacity needed to bring it to fruition.
Unlike many texts that focus on tactical strategy or fiscal metrics, Bill Snyder's Lessons in Leadership is ultimately a book about people. Drawing on his experience transforming Kansas State's football program, Snyder posits that lasting success is rarely the product of individual talent alone. It is instead often the result of the steady application of culture, discipline, and the daily pursuit of excellence.
That lesson extends far beyond the sports field. As an organization grows, leadership becomes less about micromanagement of results and more about cultivating an ecosystem where brilliance can flourish. The strongest leaders are not those with all the answers, but those capable of identifying remarkable talent and humble enough to empower those individuals to reach their full potential.
One of the most valuable insights from Snyder’s book is that building a successful company requires setting ego aside. The aim is never to be the most brilliant mind in any given assembly. Rather, it is to assemble a team of professionals whose capabilities surpass your own, and give them the chance to thrive in their own right.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that the most transformative companies are not those that merely refine existing ideas, but those that manage to create something entirely, genuinely new. Rather than moving from one to two, improving upon what already exists, the greatest innovations move from zero to one by bringing entirely new possibilities into the world.
Many successful businesses are built by optimizing existing models, but truly visionary organizations distinguish themselves by identifying opportunities that others have overlooked. They are dedicated to addressing challenges that have yet to be identified, or building the foundations for ideas that are just starting to take shape
That idea resonated with me, because in my experience, innovation is never linear. What begins as a solution to one specific challenge can, over time and with experience, evolve into something far more substantial. Indeed, the organizations that endure are those capable of generating value in ways neither their founders nor the marketplace could have fully anticipated at the outset.
The marketplace for productivity advice is saturated with new schemes and inventions on how to best organize your inbox, how to keep on top of your schedule, a tidy desk makes for a tidy mind, and so on. It all has its place. Yet much of this self-help discourse, in my opinion, misses the mark when it comes to productivity. I believe that real productivity is rarely the byproduct of rigorous administrative habits (although they do help).
In my experience, it is the logical outcome of a sustained investment in physical, cognitive and emotional vitality. Evidence suggests that peak performance is less dependent on finding the perfect system with which to archive your emails, and far more reliant on maintaining a strong base level that allows you to perform at your best over a sustained period.
Conventional wisdom might suggest that productivity is bound to the realm of one's desk, to be channeled into calendars, workflows, and complex time-management systems. But this view overlooks the physical state of the person tasked with executing them. In my view, this perspective reverses the true relationship. Productivity is the result of prioritizing self-care; it is an investment in one's own body and mind where fitness plays a central role. It requires focus, resilience, and the ability to perform consistently, which are all difficult to sustain without a robust physical foundation supporting them.
In that sense, fitness is not something I separate from work, but rather it’s what enables me to be at my best in and outside the office. I’ve found that spending time in the gym, lifting weights, running or doing other forms of cardio has a measurable impact on my mental health and capabilities. Ultimately, I feel my best and I feel my most productive when I feel the healthiest. It may sound self-evident, but it is surprising how often we look for external productivity schemes before addressing the fundamental habits that generate the very energy and mental clarity those systems are designed to organize.
Leadership demands more than physical strength. The constant need to process information, make decisions, manage uncertainty and keep perspective when the environment around you is moving quickly is the main source of pressure. Mental fitness must be treated with the same gravity as physical fitness: they are intimately linked, but not synonymous. It is possible to have energy and still lack clarity. You can have discipline and still lose perspective. Mental fitness means building the capacity to stay composed, focused, and thoughtful when the demands of the day begin to accumulate.
I make sure I create space away from the noise of the business, even if only for a short period of time. I am a gym-goer through and through, but I also enjoy meditation, yoga, running and other interactive sports. These practices help reset the mind in different ways. Meditation creates stillness, yoga instills patience and control , running provides mental space. In high-pressure environments, those precious moments help you return to the work with a clearer mind and better judgment, which naturally leads to greater productivity.
Building a company means facing an endless list of tasks: meetings to attend, problems to navigate, and opportunities to seize. A deliberate framework is essential to ensure that the demands of the business do not become all-consuming. True productivity is not just about maintaining momentum; it's also about maintaining perspective. I know for a fact that the most effective leaders are not those who dedicate every waking hour to the grind. They possess the ability to retreat from the noise, assess the bigger picture with a clear lens and avoid the trap of getting sucked into every demand that lands on their desk.
My perspective on this issue is shaped by my faith. My belief in God is fundamental to my mental fitness. It provides a framework that extends beyond the day-to-day pressures of business and helps keep both successes and setbacks in their proper context. Everyone needs something that exists outside of work itself. This may be found through faith, family, community, or personal values. Building a company requires commitment, but you shouldn't lose sight of your long-term goals. The ability to stay grounded is key to sustaining the consistency, discipline, and judgment that long-term productivity ultimately depends on.
We often measure the payments industry according to speed, cost, and user experience. These are visible, measurable metrics that are easy to compare. However, they don't fully explain why money moves the way it does. Underlying every transaction is a set of incentives that determine how the entire system operates. Apparently straightforward transfers of value are, in reality, mechanisms involving the holding, routing, and processing of money, each of which carries its own economic implications.
Within this paradigm, time is never neutral; nor are access or control over the movement. Over time, the infrastructure supporting payments has evolved to extract value along the transaction journey. End users may not always be aware of these dynamics, but they are integral to how the traditional system functions.
A commonly overlooked yet critical aspect of payments is what happens while money is in transit. Many assume that the system is designed to move funds as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But in practice, the situation is more nuanced, because every second that the bank holds those funds, they’re earning interest on them. It’s a simple enough notion, yet it completely changes how you view the system. If holding funds generates value, then time becomes an integral factor in the process. Rather, it becomes part of the system's economics.
At scale, this has phenomenal implications. Between clearing windows, settlement cycles, and internal processes, what seems like a slight delay at the individual level accumulates into a consistent source of value. This is not limited to one participant either. Rather, it is embedded within the structure of the system. Value is made to stay within the system in order to leverage it.
Over time, these incentives have become entwined to shape the structure of the system itself. What appears as operational friction, in fact reflects how value is distributed within the network. As new layers were introduced to address specific challenges, they also created new opportunities for participation and revenue. The result is a system where efficiency is not always the priority.
If each point of interaction contributes to the system's overall economics, whether through fees, access, or control over timing, then it's understandable why participants would be hesitant to change the status quo. What is beginning to emerge is an alternative approach to this model. Newer, blockchain-based payment infrastructures are designed with different priorities from the outset.
By enabling more direct forms of settlement, they reduce reliance on extended processing times, layered intermediaries, and the need to extract value from the movement itself. In doing so, these systems emphasize speed, lower cost, and transparency. More importantly, they begin to shift the balance of benefit back towards the system's user, rather than its maker.
Newer payment rails, particularly those built on blockchain systems, are designed with different priorities in mind. They reduce the need for extended processing cycles and intermediaries by enabling direct settlement between parties. The result is a system in which speed becomes the baseline expectation.
Transparency is another characteristic that sets these systems apart. Transactions can be verified in real time with clear visibility into movement and settlement, thereby reducing reliance on opaque processes and post-transaction reconciliation, replacing them with a more immediate and accessible form of trust.
With fewer intermediaries and less reliance on legacy infrastructure, the cost of moving value can be significantly reduced. What was once distributed across multiple participants is now streamlined into a more efficient process. Taken together, these developments represent a more user-centric infrastructure that focuses on enabling faster, clearer, and more cost-effective transactions, rather than extracting value from the process itself.
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Time and time again, stablecoins have demonstrated their transformative potential. They facilitate value transfer with unparalleled speed and efficiency, bypassing the multiple intermediaries embedded within the traditional financial system. For transactions ranging from simple cross-border payments to multi-million dollar transfers, the reduction in friction and increase in speed is a fundamental, not marginal, advantage.
However, a significant hurdle remains, preventing widespread adoption. It is not a question of functionality, but one of trust. As these assets move from early adopters into the fiery underbelly of mainstream finance, the primary concern is not utility, but rather ensuring confidence in the value underpinning stablecoins.
At a purely functional level, the case for stablecoins is no longer up for debate. The infrastructure has been built, tested, and proven in real-world scenarios. The transition from theory to operational reality is complete, and these systems now often surpass those they were designed to augment or replace.
Traditional financial rails, particularly for large or cross-border transactions, are heavily burdened by layers of intermediaries. Each step introduces extra delay, cost and complexity, with settlement times stretching from hours to days. Leveraging blockchain infrastructure, stablecoins drastically reduce friction in value transfer. They facilitate direct, near-instantaneous movement of funds between parties, making geography and transaction size irrelevant.
Transfers that previously took days can now be finalized in a matter of seconds. That is a game-changing shift in how value moves. And yet, this unprecedented efficiency alone has not been enough to drive universal adoption.
If the efficiency argument has already been settled, then the hesitation surrounding stablecoins lies elsewhere. If it is not about how they function, perhaps it is about what they represent. To take cryptocurrency back to basics, stablecoins are only as reliable as the assets that back them. For users, whether that is individuals, businesses, or institutions, the question is, what is actually underpinning this value?
The answer to that will determine whether a stablecoin is seen as a viable financial instrument, or as a risk. This is where much of the reluctance stems from. As the market has grown, the number of stablecoins has also increased, with each one claiming to be stable and offering a similar value proposition. However, not all stablecoins are built equal. The real differentiating factor is not branding or adoption, but the strength, structure and accessibility of the underlying collateral. Liquidity provisioning is central to this equation.
A stablecoin must not only claim to be backed, but also demonstrate that it can meet demand at scale without creating friction. Users need to know that the value represented by a stablecoin is not only theoretical, but also immediately accessible when they hold or transfer it. Until that trust has been firmly established, hesitation will inevitably remain.
As the stablecoin market matures, one fundamental principle is beginning to separate credible projects from the rest: transparency. For years, much of the industry has relied on periodic attestations or self-reported audits to validate reserves. This may have been enough in the past, but this model no longer meets today's standards.
There is a growing expectation for real-time visibility. Users want to clearly and immediately see the assets underpinning the stablecoin they hold. They want verifiable proof, not abstract guarantees. The closer a project gets to providing this level of transparency, the more confidence it will inspire.
This inevitable shift will drive consolidation within the digital asset space. Just as in past cycles, an initial flood of new entrants will be replaced by a smaller group of credible, transparent, and well-capitalized operators. The stablecoins that come out on top will be those consistently able to prove their collateral is strong and easily accessible.
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If you strip the global financial system down to its core, its function is deceptively simple: a mechanism for transferring and exchanging value. Whether it’s a cross-border payment between corporations, a consumer’s purchase at a local store, or the settlement of a high-frequency stock trade, the operation remains the same: financial assets are moved from point A to point B. The problem is, it doesn’t do it very well. It is plagued by a complex, multi-layered architecture involving correspondent banks, various clearinghouses and disparate technological standards.
Joshua Tate, CEO and co-founder of ForumPay, argues that stablecoins are gaining traction not due to their role as a novel asset or on-chain holding bay for traders (though they function as both), but rather as a superior settlement rail. Stablecoins, being digital assets pegged 1:1 to a stable reserve asset, such as the U.S. Dollar, harness decentralized ledger technology (DLT) to offer a direct, peer-to-peer and near-instantaneous method for value transfer.
In this context, Joshua Tate sees stablecoins beginning to redefine the mechanisms underpinning value transfer within the global financial system, transitioning it from complex, time-consuming back-office functions to seamless, instantaneous data transfers, thereby unlocking a new era of efficiency in the global movement of value.
As the CEO of global crypto payment gateway, ForumPay, Joshua Tate operates at the nexus of digital assets and real-world payments, navigating the limitations of traditional financial infrastructure on a daily basis. Working across both crypto and conventional payment systems, his perspective is grounded in how value actually moves, and where it breaks down.
From that vantage point, he believes stablecoins are emerging as a powerful solution to the inherent limitations of traditional financial infrastructure, particularly when it comes to value transfer and settlement. Existing financial rails are characterized by a complex web of multiple intermediaries, each adding layers of cost and time to the payment flow. This multi-layered system is the fundamental cause of significant delays, especially in cross-border transactions.
But this slowness is not born of technical inability; it is structural. Embedded deep within the legacy systems’ regulatory and operational models, the need for multiple hand-offs, batch processing, and disparate operating hours creates significant inefficiencies.
This is precisely the hurdle that Tate sees stablecoins solving. By operating on modern and transparent blockchain infrastructure, stablecoins offer a direct settlement layer, eliminating the need for many slow, costly intermediaries. The result is the potential for near-instantaneous, cost-effective, 24/7/365 settlement, regardless of geographic borders, thereby modernizing global financial plumbing.
As a settlement rail, they enable direct value transfer that supports cross-border payments and reduces counterparty risk. As a bridge layer, stablecoins link digital economies with fiat, connect disparate blockchain networks, and provide a stable asset for traditional finance to engage with DeFi. This establishes a new, programmable, and highly efficient global layer for financial settlement.
While the efficiency gains of stablecoins are increasingly clear, their long-term adoption will ultimately hinge on the fundamental issue of trust. According to Tate, not all stablecoins are created equal. The real differentiator is not speed or usability, but confidence in the underlying asset. What backs the stablecoin? How is liquidity provisioned? And, critically, can that be verified in real time?
These questions are becoming central concerns as stablecoins move beyond trading environments and into real-world financial operations. For businesses and institutions, settlement is about certainty, and without transparency, efficiency alone is not enough.
Tate believes that this is likely to drive a natural consolidation within the market. As more stablecoins enter the ecosystem, only those with clear, verifiable collateral and robust liquidity will gain lasting traction. Models that rely on opaque structures or delayed reporting will struggle to compete in an environment where real-time visibility is increasingly expected.
For Tate, the rise of stablecoins is part of a larger structural transformation, one fundamentally propelled by the digitalization of finance and the growing trend of asset tokenization. As more forms of value transition onto digital infrastructure (take real estate, for example), the boundaries between asset classes begin to blur. Tokenization involves turning real-world assets into digitally native, interoperable, and 24/7-accessible assets held within a single environment.
In a fully digital financial ecosystem, assets can be used directly and move instantaneously, eliminating the need for conversion, complex routing, seasoning and associated delays. The traditional requirement to liquidate (selling one asset to access another) is thus rendered obsolete. From Tate’s perspective, this is where the next phase of financial infrastructure is heading: toward a global settlement model that maximizes capital efficiency by enabling real-time, asset-agnostic transactions.
This asset-agnostic future requires sophisticated infrastructure, an area where Tate is building an impressive legacy. At ForumPay, the focus has been on enabling interoperability between asset classes, bridging digital assets, fiat, and tokenized value into a unified payment flow. By abstracting away the on- and off-ramp complexity inherent to cryptocurrency conversion, ForumPay allows different forms of value to be used interchangeably in real-world transactions. Whether it is peer-to-peer or B2B payment, or consumers purchasing goods and services from merchants and businesses, ForumPay handles the value transfer, ensuring the recipient receives instant confirmation and next-day settlement.
In this context, stablecoins are not the ultimate goal, but rather a crucial structural component for a more efficient global architecture. They serve as a foundational layer, offering the necessary liquidity and stability to build a financial system that is more programmable and liberated from the burden of disparate asset classes.
Joshua Tate co-founded ForumPay in 2019 and has been CEO since its launch. For more information, visit www.forumpay.com.
