From 1970s check-clearing arbitrage to roughly $390 billion in annual stablecoin payments today, companies are using blockchain systems to move cash, collateral and securities in ways that older financial infrastructure could not handle as quickly.
The article, written by Thejaswini M A and published by BlockTempo, makes one main point: technology can automate the movement of value, but it does not remove the labor required to judge counterparty risk.
It sets old and new corporate finance practices side by side. In the 1970s, U.S. companies delayed settlement by mailing checks through remote banks. Today, Deel uses stablecoins for payroll across more than 150 countries and territories, Kinexys moves billions of dollars in collateral every day, and Tether generates outsized profit with a workforce of about 300. The throughline is the same: companies want to free up trapped liquidity and shorten settlement cycles.
When delayed checks were a business strategy
In the 1970s, some U.S. companies hired consultants to help slow down the movement of money. The method was known as remote disbursement.
A buyer in New Jersey, for example, could write a check drawn on a small bank in Montana. Distance mattered. So did the extra handoffs between banks. The check would take days to clear, and while those funds were still sitting in the payer’s account, they could keep earning interest. With rates above 10%, those extra days had real value.
Some consultants were paid to maintain maps showing which small-town banks had the longest clearing times. The scale of check use made the strategy possible. Americans wrote 8 billion checks in 1970 and 16 billion by 1980. The Federal Reserve’s check float — funds recorded in two places because checks had been credited but not yet collected — averaged about $3 billion a day in 1972, then more than doubled between 1975 and 1978.
The Fed pushed back. In February 1979, it released a report on remote disbursement and later issued a policy statement telling banks to stop facilitating the practice. The Monetary Control Act of 1980 required a broad prohibition. Two decades later, the Check 21 Act effectively closed the chapter. Most checks now clear within one business day, and the Fed processes all checks in a building in Atlanta.
Siemens cut bond settlement from two days to minutes
The article then moves to present-day corporate operations. Siemens has more than 12,000 employees across more than 80 countries, and its global business services unit handles invoices, payroll and reconciliations. It also notes that Airbus opened an office in Lisbon in July 2021 and now has more than 1,000 employees in that center and its industrial operations in Portugal, while Goldman Sachs has 47,400 employees overall.
In September 2024, Siemens issued a €300 million bond and settled it on blockchain rails in minutes.
This was not its first attempt. In February 2023, Siemens issued €60 million on Polygon, but settlement still took two days. Eighteen months later, it returned with a €300 million issuance on SWIAT, which the article describes as a closed ledger built by a consortium of European banks for transactions that fit institutional rules.
That regulatory fit allowed the deal to connect to the Deutsche Bundesbank’s trigger solution, letting the full €300 million settle automatically in central bank money within minutes. The article highlights a seven-minute settlement window.
Investors subscribed directly and could see their registration details as soon as settlement was complete. Siemens treasurer Peter Rathgeb handled both issuances, and the article says the second one all but removed settlement risk for the parties involved.
Traditional institutions have not disappeared from the picture. In ordinary circumstances, a central securities depository such as Clearstream would still be involved in handling this kind of instrument. The article is explicit on that point: no Clearstream employee is losing a job because one German bond settled this way.
Deel is using stablecoins for payroll
Deel provides payroll services to more than 40,000 companies and 1.5 million workers across more than 150 countries and territories, processing more than $22 billion a year. According to the article, companies have been able to use stablecoin treasuries to pay global payroll directly since January 2026. In June 2026, Deel launched DLUSD, a dollar-backed digital balance.
On the employer side, the article lists several pain points: liquidity stuck in overseas bank accounts, emergency troubleshooting after remittances fail, conversion fees paid to FX intermediaries, and manual account reconciliation.
For workers, the case for dollar-linked balances is tied to local-currency weakness. In Argentina, Turkey and Ukraine, wages paid in local currency can lose 20% to 40% of their value in a year, the article says. In 2025, 85% of Deel’s contractors in Argentina chose to be paid in dollars.
In June this year, Deel added dollar balances inside the app those users were already using and offered rewards on idle funds. The article says the app is built on Bridge, Privy and Tempo. In May this year, Deel also began paying full-time staff in the U.S. and the eurozone with Polygon-issued stablecoins, covering 10% to 25% of post-tax net salary.
The piece also cites a joint EY and Parthenon survey of 350 corporate executives. It found that 13% of companies have already adopted stablecoins. Among that group, 41% reported cost reductions of more than 10% in cross-border B2B payments. On a $50 million transfer program, a 10% efficiency gain would save $5 million, money that had previously been treated as fixed operating cost. Another 54% of non-users said they planned to adopt the infrastructure within a year.
Stablecoin payment volumes are moving into the enterprise mainstream
By February 2026, annual end-user stablecoin payments are projected to reach about $390 billion, double the 2024 level, with around 60% tied to B2B activity rather than pure trading, the article says.
It adds more examples. Hyundai Card completed a cross-border corporate payment in seven minutes. Visa has reached a $7 billion annualized settlement run rate across nine stablecoin chains, up 50% in a single quarter. In the author’s framing, these are not fringe tests run by crypto-native companies. They are live tools for solving slow cross-border settlement and trapped liquidity.
Collateral is changing, but judgment work remains
On collateral, the article points to Kinexys, BlackRock, Barclays, BNY and CME Group.
Kinexys, a JPMorgan business, processes about $5 billion a day, has cleared $3 trillion in cumulative volume, and has handled more than $1.75 trillion in intraday repo transactions alone. BlackRock has delivered tokenized money market funds to Barclays as derivatives collateral. BNY handles $354 billion in transactions each day. CME Group is working with Google Cloud on similar infrastructure, aimed at a collateral market worth $15 trillion.
The article then explains why collateral matters. A hedge fund may hold a position it does not want to sell but still wants to borrow against. Because the parties do not fully trust each other, the collateral is usually parked with a tri-party agent. Someone has to negotiate the agent agreement first. The assets then move over several days, and the fees keep adding up.
Tokenized, semi-liquid collateral can preserve the original safety features while changing how borrowers use it. Systems can freeze collateral, alter spending conditions, or skip transfers altogether. That is where the logistics layer starts to thin out. What remains are the harder tasks: valuing assets and making default calls late at night when positions move against a borrower.
Trade finance failures show what software does not remove
The article argues that technology does not erase the cost of getting counterparty judgments wrong, and that helps explain why some blockchain projects survived while others shut down.
Between 2018 and 2020, four trade finance blockchain networks were launched by large companies including HSBC, Maersk and BNP Paribas. None lasted beyond 2023.
- June 2022: we.trade went bankrupt.
- November 2022: Maersk and IBM shut down TradeLens.
- Early 2023: Marco Polo closed with $4.6 million in liabilities.
- November 2023: Contour shut down after averaging only 60 to 70 transactions a month, and was later acquired by XDC Network.
Faster electronic letters of credit improved document handling, the article says, but they did not change the core cost of underwriting credit.
Komgo was the only survivor in that group. The article says it survived because it abandoned blockchain. Launched in 2018 by several large banks, Komgo initially offered digital letters of credit and document workflow tools. The letter-of-credit product failed, but the paper-document product kept running. While rivals collapsed trying to digitize trust itself, Komgo stayed alive by shifting to a more mechanical pipeline business.
Tether’s profit engine, and where labor comes back in
Tether is presented as a different kind of boundary case. In this telling, it functions as a mechanical pipe: it takes in dollars, holds U.S. Treasuries and issues tokens, while exchanges handle customer-facing activity. That strips out much of the operating cost tied to human trust management.
With that model, a team of about 300 generated $10.09 billion in profit in 2025. The article puts profit per employee at $33.6 million, far above the figures associated with traditional risk-managed banks such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.
But labor returns once lending expands. Tether’s secured loans rose from $14.6 billion on Sept. 30 to $17.04 billion on Dec. 31, an increase of nearly $7 billion over six months. Borrowers were not identified, though the loans were backed by a $6.34 billion safety net.
The article says that when Tether moved into lending again, it had to hire people to assess collateral and handle margin calls late at night.
It also says two details distort Tether’s profitability. First, nearly half of its profit came from surging prices for its gold and Bitcoin holdings. Second, the billions of dollars’ worth of tokens it issues do not require interest payments. A conventional bank holding the same scale of client money would have to pay billions in annual interest expense.
Circle shows the same limit from the other side
Circle illustrates the same boundary from another direction. According to the article’s reference to the company’s 10-K filing, Circle expects Coinbase-related distribution costs to reach $1.4 billion in 2025, up from $924.5 million.
That means 51% of its $2.7 billion in revenue goes to Coinbase, a company that neither issues USDC nor manages its reserves. Coinbase handles user onboarding, KYC and anti-fraud teams. The article’s point is straightforward: customer verification still needs human judgment. Circle lowers headcount by outsourcing that work, turning what would have been internal payroll expense into an external contract cost.
What blockchain does change in corporate finance
The article closes by naming three operating problems that enterprise blockchain and stablecoins are now addressing: automating the movement of cash, collateral and certificates; releasing liquidity trapped in payroll float and escrow accounts; and reducing cross-border friction in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. Those are the same areas where executives in the survey reported cost savings of 10% or more.
Corporate bond issuance on these rails remains small. Germany’s eWpG framework gave Siemens a path to issue, but the market is still limited. As of June 2024, total issuance of digital securities under eWpG stood at about €236 million, with KfW accounting for €150 million across two transactions. That has not altered the broader European corporate bond market.
The contrast at the end is simple. Treasurers once made money by delaying settlement. After float income faded, they managed prefunded accounts instead. Tokenization is now changing that operating model too. What disappears first is the logistics work around moving assets. What stays is the judgment work: credit assessment, collateral valuation, KYC and fraud review.