The contest between traditional finance and crypto is shifting into a different shape. Rather than replacing banks outright, a new layer is emerging between legacy finance and blockchain-based settlement, and the article argues that this is where value is starting to concentrate.
For most of financial history, the hard part was not the idea of moving money from point A to point B. The friction came from the chain of banks involved, the fees each one could charge, and the added complexity of cross-border transfers. Crypto and stablecoins spent the past decade promising faster and cheaper transfers through wallets and crypto apps. But the article says that speed and lower cost do not matter much if funds cannot be used across the broader economy. A dollar stuck inside a crypto wallet is less useful than one that can move through ordinary financial channels.
That is why the piece frames crypto less as a standalone replacement system and more as infrastructure for moving existing financial assets. It calls this model “Web 2.5,” a setup that keeps what traditional finance already has — regulation, licensing, verification, and user interfaces people already trust — while adding low-cost, programmable, always-on settlement underneath. Banks remain banks. Crypto becomes the rail underneath them.
Crypto infrastructure and the rise of Web 2.5
The article’s central argument is that the layer connecting old finance and on-chain settlement can end up being more valuable than many of the institutions it connects. It points to Visa as one example. In the fiscal year ending in September 2025, Visa posted $24 billion in operating profit, according to the article, even though the fee on each transaction across its network was less than 1%. Its operating margin was 60%.
The piece also cites the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. It says DTCC processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2025 and generated $2.9 billion in profit. The point is straightforward: even when transaction processing itself becomes more standardized, the institutions that sit in the conversion and coordination layer can still capture large amounts of value.
That helps explain why several institutions are now building systems that let banks keep their existing infrastructure while converting ISO 20022 instructions into on-chain settlement flows.
Chainlink and the fight for the middle layer
On June 23, Chainlink and a consortium of more than 50 banks from Europe and South Korea announced Project Pangea. The article says those banks together hold roughly $10 trillion in assets. The aim is to test real-time settlement for foreign exchange trades and shift infrastructure from the standard T+2 cycle toward instant T+0 settlement.
In the article’s description, Chainlink’s Runtime Environment, or CRE, acts as an orchestration layer between blockchains and outside payment systems. Instead of relying on manual routing or bridge-heavy workflows, it converts ordinary instructions into on-chain atomic swaps and returns the result to bank systems in a form they can read.
The article notes that DTCC, a 50-year-old institution at the center of US markets, has also chosen the same Chainlink runtime for its collateral AppChain. That is presented as evidence that traditional financial infrastructure is not just watching these tools from a distance. It is beginning to use them directly.
SWIFT is another example the article uses to show how the battleground has changed. For years, crypto forecasts often assumed that blockchains or stablecoins would displace SWIFT’s messaging monopoly. Eight years ago, SWIFT said blockchain was “not yet ready for mainstream adoption.” Now, according to the article, SWIFT is building a blockchain-based shared ledger with more than 40 banks.
The article argues that this is not a replacement for the SWIFT network. It is an orchestration layer built on top of it. From SWIFT’s point of view, the threat is not simply that money can move on-chain. The threat is being left out of the layer that decides how that money moves on-chain. If SWIFT stays inside that layer, it keeps its seat at the table.
Sovereign institutions are moving in as well. The piece says the Bank for International Settlements has brought together seven central banks and more than 40 private-sector institutions for Project Agorá, which is designed to test atomic settlement using tokenized central bank reserves.
The translation layer and the power it carries
The article goes beyond revenue and treats the translation layer as a source of power. A system that simply allows two sides of finance to “talk” to one another may end up more valuable than the players on either side.
Visa and Mastercard began as routing networks between banks and merchants. Even today, the article notes, they do not hold deposits, issue cards themselves, or take balance-sheet risk. Yet Visa’s market capitalization is still larger than that of every bank in the world except JPMorgan.
That kind of layer does not just collect fees. It can also determine who gets access and when that access can be cut off. The article points to SWIFT again here. Created in 1973 as a standardized bank messaging system, it has grown into an institution with sanctions power. Over the past decade, the article says, SWIFT has played a central part in economic warfare, including sanctions linked to Russia’s war in Ukraine and earlier European Union sanctions on Iranian banks tied to efforts to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, before those measures were loosened after progress on a nuclear deal.
Why the market is so large
The Chainlink-Pangea pilot matters, in the article’s view, because of the size of the addressable market behind it. Cross-border payments amount to between $150 trillion and $190 trillion a year, the piece says, and are expected to exceed $250 trillion by 2030.
If Chainlink and its group of 50 partner banks captured even 1% of that market, the article says the total addressable market would exceed $1.5 trillion. At a fee rate of just 0.1%, that would translate into $1.5 billion in revenue for the bridge between traditional financial messaging and on-chain settlement.
The article adds a caution, though. Systems like SWIFT and Visa became dominant standards in their own markets, and those markets tended to settle around a single winner for long periods of time. This time, there are four competing models in play — protocols, market utilities, bank cooperatives, and central bank clubs — all trying to control one translation layer linking the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 versions of finance.
The economics behind that layer are not new. As money movement technology improves, transaction processing itself becomes more like a commodity. The article says the value then concentrates in two places:
- authorization, meaning the power to decide whether a transaction can happen and under what terms;
- float, meaning the interest earned while funds sit idle waiting to move.
It adds that the same logic previously used to analyze payments between AI agents now applies to settlement between banks.
From decentralization rhetoric to hidden infrastructure
The reason this coordination layer is so contested, the article argues, is that it creates a two-sided network effect. The more banks connect on one side, the more attractive the system becomes to settlement institutions on the other side, and the reverse is also true. Every additional institution raises switching costs for those already inside. Banks and blockchains may compete with one another, but the institution that coordinates between them can serve all of them and charge each side for access.
The article compares this to Stripe’s role in card payments. Stripe used a simpler, developer-friendly API to hide the complexity of processors, acquirers, and payment networks in the background, then charged users for removing that friction.
That is also why connection layers become acquisition targets. The piece points back to Visa’s agreement five years ago to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion. The deal ultimately failed after an antitrust lawsuit by the US Department of Justice, but the article says the strategy was plain: Visa wanted to acquire the market share of the connection layer Plaid had built between thousands of fintech apps and bank accounts.
The article closes by arguing that Web 2.5 looks more viable than a fully decentralized Web 3.0 utopia. It does not require capital to abandon existing institutions in order to use crypto-based services. Instead, it puts crypto underneath the existing system as a more efficient way to move money and assets.
Projects such as Pangea, DTCC’s AppChain, and Agorá are still in pre-production, the article says, but it views the direction taken by players such as Chainlink favorably. It also suggests that long-running arguments inside crypto — which chain has the lowest gas fees, which token should hold value, or how to persuade users to abandon traditional payment systems — become less important in a Web 2.5 model because the infrastructure fades into the background.
In that framing, blockchain is gradually turning into a more interchangeable, less visible, lower-margin component of financial transactions. The value is moving into the business models built around money flow and into the authority to decide how money moves, or whether it moves at all.