Money should just be money! The digital dollar in the era of stablecoins, has a "fragmentation problem" appeared?

Research indicates that modern fintech and the crypto industry have sliced dollar-denominated assets into multiple closed apps and blockchain networks, resulting in fragmented money liquidity.

After the rapid development of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and fintech, “money” should have become freer, more instant, and cheaper. But in “Money Should be Money,” Dante Reminick points out that modern fintech instead cuts money into more isolated islands: the dollars in Venmo, the dollars in Cash App, the dollars in Apple Cash, the dollars in PayPal, USDC on Base, USDT on Tron, and USDC on Solana—all seemingly called “dollars,” yet in reality they cannot interoperate seamlessly without friction.

His core argument is very direct: money should be money. A dollar should not become a “secondary dollar” with different liquidity, usability, and costs merely because it exists across different apps, different blockchains, different stablecoin issuers, or different payment networks. But today’s fintech and crypto industries are reenacting the currency fragmentation of 19th-century American “wildcat bank” times—only wrapped in prettier user interfaces.

19th-century American wildcat banks: One dollar is not equal to one dollar

Reminick begins with the U.S. banking system before the 1860s. At that time, more than 8,000 different banknotes circulated in America, each issued by a different state-chartered bank, with each bank having its own reserves, credit assessment, and risk of counterfeit notes.

This means that a dollar issued by a New York bank is not necessarily equal to a dollar issued by an Indiana bank. When travelers moved across state lines, they had to carry a publication titled Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter to look up the discount rate of the notes they held. There were currency exchange dealers on the streets, and counterfeiters exploited information asymmetry and credit differences for arbitrage. Even paper notes with the same denomination could have entirely different real values depending on which bank issued them.

This era is known as “wildcat banking,” meaning the wildcat bank era. Its problem was that trust became fragmented. Every banknote had to be re-evaluated, and with every transaction, the issuer, discount rate, authenticity, and acceptability had to be confirmed.

Later, the United States solved this problem through the 1863 National Banking Act, establishing a more unified nationwide framework for banknotes and currency. A dollar finally began to truly resemble “a dollar,” rather than a local credential that required looking up prices, discount rates, and verifying authenticity.

Reminick believes that today’s problem is replaying this—only the protagonists have shifted from state-chartered banks to fintech apps, payment networks, crypto exchanges, stablecoins, and blockchains.

Ordinary users may hold Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, and Apple Pay at the same time; if they also get involved with cryptocurrencies, they may have a Coinbase account, a self-custody wallet, USDC on Base, USDT on Tron, ETH on Ethereum, and SOL on Solana. All these products claim to improve the money experience, but the result is that assets are dispersed into more closed systems.

Venmo balances can mainly only be transferred or used for payments within the Venmo ecosystem; Cash App balances are largely trapped within Cash App; Apple Cash exists within the closed iOS and iMessage ecosystem; and while Zelle is built into bank apps, it cannot naturally route to other consumer payment apps.

PayPal has its own merchants and internal payment network; crypto wallets span multiple L1s and L2s, and the same logical type of asset is sliced into different versions on different networks. USDC, USDT, PYUSD, and DAI are all pegged to the dollar, but they are distributed across different settlement rails, different liquidity pools, and different issuer strategies.

These things are all denominated in dollars in name, but in practice they are not completely interchangeable. One dollar in Venmo cannot directly pay a Cash App user; USDC on Solana cannot frictionlessly pay invoices priced in USDC on Ethereum; money in Apple Cash cannot naturally flow into self-custody wallets; and if Coinbase balances are to be used for everyday grocery payments, they often still need to go through multiple layers of withdrawals, transfers, or card network processes. Modern fintech merely uses a better UX to bring back the problem of fragmented trust.

Every new financial product may create a new island

A common saying in the fintech industry is that the next layer of innovation will bring all fragmented systems together. But Reminick believes the actual outcome is usually the opposite: each new layer of innovation adds another island on top of existing ones.

This is not just a technical problem—the problem is in the business model. Any fintech company that holds user balances has an economic incentive to keep the money inside its own system. Balances in Venmo can generate float income; assets in Coinbase can be monetized through trading spreads, fees, lending, or product conversions; and PayPal, Cash App, and Apple Cash also have their own closed payment and merchant ecosystems.

Therefore, interoperability is not a technical challenge that these companies “haven’t solved,” but a business model challenge that they “don’t want to solve completely.” Because once money can leave without friction, the platform’s control over users weakens, and the moat around balances becomes thinner.

Crypto has advanced, but it has also created its own fragmentation

Reminick does not deny the progress of cryptocurrencies. He admits that smart contracts make programmable, composable money possible—something traditional fintech cannot do. DeFi, stablecoins, self-custody wallets, cross-border settlement, and on-chain applications are indeed closer to open finance than closed payment apps.

But he also points out that crypto has created its own version of fragmentation. Different chains compete for liquidity; different protocols compete for TVL; and different stablecoin issuers compete for distribution. Stablecoins solve the problem of excessive volatility in cryptocurrencies, but they have not solved money fragmentation—and may even make the problem more complex.

USDC, USDT, PYUSD, and DAI are all pegged to the same dollar, but each issuer hopes its own version of the dollar will become dominant. This means issuers have incentives to build their own distribution networks, their own partner ecosystems, and their own on-chain ecosystems, rather than serving an entirely neutral, unified financial network.

More importantly, crypto itself is also an island. The truly biggest wall is not between Solana and Ethereum, nor between L1 and L2; it is between the crypto system and the fiat system. As long as the boundary between crypto and fiat still requires high-cost in-and-out transfers, KYC, bank transfers, exchange intermediaries, and cross-system clearing, they are not the same financial system—they are two systems, with an expensive checkpoint in between.

Integration is dead; orchestration is the answer

Reminick then notes that the biggest difference between today and 1863 is that in 19th-century America, the U.S. could achieve “regulated consolidation” through laws and institutions: a unified issuance framework, one nationwide currency, and a federal financial order. But today’s fintech and crypto world is too fragmented to be solved again through a single consolidation.

The consumer finance market will not unify into one app, because competition among Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, Apple, banks, and startups is fierce. The crypto world will not unify into one chain, because the different technical roadmaps, communities, assets, ideologies, and developer ecosystems of various chains have already become structural. Stablecoins will not unify under a single issuer, because every large fintech company, bank, and technology company has realized that “issuing dollars” could be one of the highest-leverage business models in the software world.

In other words, integration is no longer realistic. Reminick’s proposed answer is “supreme orchestration,” meaning top-level capital routing, coordination, and scheduling.

By this, he does not mean eliminating all apps, all chains, or all stablecoins. Instead, it means building a layer of abstraction and real-time routing on top of them, so users and merchants do not need to see the underlying islands. Just as in the early days of the internet, routing bypassed telecom carriers that were unwilling to carry IP traffic, this new money orchestration layer should bypass uncooperative financial islands, allowing users to see only “money,” not Venmo money, Apple Cash money, Solana money, Ethereum money, or Coinbase money.

When Cash App can pay Venmo, SOL USDC can settle ETH USDT

In the ideal world described by Reminick, a dollar in Cash App should be able to pay Venmo users, and users should not need to know which payment rails are used in between. USDC on Solana should be able to settle invoices priced in USDT on Ethereum without manual cross-chain bridging. With one tap, Apple Pay could even automatically deduct funds from self-custody wallets, selecting the lowest-cost or fastest settlement route behind the scenes.

This kind of money is more valuable than closed balances—even if they are all denominated in the same dollar. The reason is that composability changes what money can do, not merely where the money is stored.

Traditional fintech traps balances because balances are the moat; stablecoins have the potential to reverse this logic, because the value of stablecoins should come from network effects and cross-platform usability. When a platform supports stablecoins, it theoretically connects to all other platforms that support the same standard or interoperable stablecoins. At that point, the moat is no longer “balances that trap users,” but “the ability to access the largest network.” Therefore, the essence of orchestration is to turn money back into money.

Build a single integration layer above all payment rails, blockchains, and liquidity sources

Reminick is responsible for GTM at Halliday, and in practical terms, he positions HallidayHQ as an example. He frames it as a universal deposit and payout company—that is, a general-purpose deposits and withdrawals company. Halliday’s goal is to sit above all fiat payment rails, blockchain networks, and liquidity sources, and connect these originally dispersed systems through a single integration point.

For developers, this solves a painful problem. Any team that wants to add on-chain payments, deposits, withdrawals, or cross-chain asset flows must deal with a whole chain of complex tasks: connecting fiat deposit channels, exchanges, bridges, cross-chain states, gas on different chains, liquidity of different tokens, payment methods in different regions, compliance, and user experience. Each team ends up repeating these tasks, which is highly inefficient.

Halliday’s idea is to package this complexity into a plug-and-play interface. When a user wants to deposit or withdraw funds, Halliday will calculate the optimal path in real time based on the user’s location, payment method, target chain, amount, current liquidity, and available rails. Developers do not need to write routing logic themselves, nor do they need to pre-configure bridge options. Users do not need to see network selectors, gas estimators, or complicated cross-chain processes.

On the surface, users only complete a deposit or a payment. Behind the scenes, it may involve tens of millions of calculations, with real-time routing across different payment rails and liquidity sources.

Halliday wants to sell “payment infrastructure that doesn’t need rebuilding”

Reminick also specifically mentioned that Halliday will directly deploy underlying smart contracts, so that client applications inherit the solution instead of inheriting infrastructure problems. This smart contract design also keeps Halliday’s infrastructure non-custodial, compliant, and highly efficient.

The key phrase here is forward composability. That is to say, when Halliday’s network adds new rollups, new tokens, new payment rails, or new liquidity sources, developers who have already integrated Halliday do not need to rebuild the entire payment system again. Applications can automatically benefit from network expansion.

This is different from many Web3 payment or deposit tools today. Many teams integrate one ramp, one bridge, one exchange, or a few chains; then when the market shifts to a new L2, a new stablecoin, or new regional payment methods, they must again re-develop, re-integrate, and re-maintain. What Halliday wants is to centralize these changes into a routing layer that can sustainably expand, so that the application side does not have to keep chasing infrastructure changes.

• This article is reprinted with permission from: Chain News
• Original title: The Problem of Digital Dollar Fragmentation in the Stablecoin Era: Money Should Be Money
• Original author: Neo