The first in a series on how money moves — and what stablecoins are doing to change it.
Late last year, Lead acquired Loop, a stablecoin payments company. I'm Eleni, Loop's founder, and I now lead stablecoins at Lead. The acquisition raised a fair question: why would a bank — an industry that has historically kept crypto at arm's length — buy a stablecoin company?
The short answer: Lead is a different kind of bank, stablecoins are a different kind of crypto, and the two have been quietly converging on something that looks a lot like the future of financial infrastructure. Lead has pursued the digital asset industry from its founding and the reasons why become clear the more you understand about Lead. This series will work through what that means: how money actually moves, where the gaps are, and what stablecoins are doing to fill them. We'll start with the foundation.
What makes a bank a bank
The list of things only banks can do is surprisingly short. Only banks can hold deposits. Lending, cards, and money movement aren't bank-exclusive by statute, but they route through banks because the funds sit in deposit accounts, card networks require a bank issuer, and direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails requires a Fed master account.
These capabilities come with real accountability. Send money to a sanctioned party? The bank answers for it. A drug dealer opens an account? The bank is liable. KYC, AML, OFAC - these aren't compliance theater. They're legal and regulatory obligations that sit at the core of what it means to operate as a bank.
The peer-to-peer apps most people use to move money are not banks today. They work by sitting on top of banks or utilizing non-bank licenses like state money transmitter licenses. When you use buy now, pay later in checkout, chances are a bank originates that loan. In many cases, Lead is often that bank.
Lead is built to serve fintechs, which means moving at the speed of the latest technology rather than the speed of legacy infrastructure. Lead offers Banking-as-a-Service: APIs that let fintechs own the customer experiences while still meeting every compliance obligation. That combination is harder than it sounds, which is why only a handful of banks operate in this space. It comes down to genuinely understanding your partners, accurately calibrating risk, and building processes to match.
How money moves in the US
Payment rails are networks, and what matters most about any network is who else is on it. A fast rail that reaches 5% of accounts is less useful than a slower rail that reaches 95%. When banks move money through ACH, Fedwire, FedNow, RTP, or SWIFT, the choice of rail comes down to three things: reach (can I send money to whoever I need to), speed/availability (can it arrive when I need it to), and cost.
ACH and Fedwire have solved reach. Functionally, every US bank is on them. If you need to move dollars to another US account, one of these rails will get you there. The tradeoff is speed versus cost: ACH is cheap but slow, taking 1-2 days. Same-day ACH is faster and costs a bit more. Fedwire settles in minutes but costs more still. One tradeoff you cannot make is on availability - they only operate on business days, no matter how much you're willing to pay.
FedNow and RTP solved speed and availability. Both are 24/7 and settle in seconds and can do this without trading off too much in cost. Where they fall short is universal reach. Of roughly 8,700 US depository institutions, RTP has around 1,000 participating, but because the largest banks are on it, it reaches roughly 70% of US demand deposit accounts. FedNow (launched by the Fed in 2023) has crossed 1,500 institutions as of mid-2026, and is growing quickly.
One often cited deterrent to growing these real-time networks is liquidity management. If money can move at 3am on a Sunday from your bank, but the assets you'd unwind to cover a shortfall are at a bank that isn’t on a real-time payment rail, you have a mismatch. The industry is still working out what round-the-clock settlement means for treasury operations.
International is a different problem entirely
SWIFT is the messaging network that lets banks coordinate cross-border payments. However, SWIFT doesn't move money. Money moves through correspondent banking relationships, where banks hold accounts with each other. If your bank doesn't have a direct relationship with the bank on the other end, your payment routes through intermediaries, each taking a fee, each adding latency, each able to reject your transaction if your business model doesn't fit their risk appetite.
You get reach (you can send money almost anywhere) but not speed, not transparency, and not predictable costs. Compliance obligations incentivize intermediaries to avoid anything they can't easily explain.
Enter blockchains
Over the last fifteen years, a new type of payment network has been built that benefits from being open. Anyone can spin up a wallet and send funds globally. The hard part has always been getting in: to transact on a blockchain, you needed the native asset, and to get that, you needed to buy it somewhere.
Exchanges solved on-ramping by letting people trade fiat for crypto. But in order to do that, they had to connect to local banks and banking rails. Once fiat was flowing in, the ecosystem needed a common medium of exchange that wasn't volatile. Stablecoins filled that role. They started as a trading pair - a dollar-pegged asset to quote prices against - and became the default unit for moving value inside crypto.
They also became the mechanism for moving value between exchanges. Moving fiat across venues is slow and expensive; stablecoins let traders shift positions across platforms in minutes. As volumes grew, OTC desks and market makers such as Cumberland, Galaxy, B2C2, FalconX, and others became major fiat-to-stablecoin liquidity providers, each connecting to local banks on one side and to blockchains on the other.
What emerged is a growing mesh: exchanges, OTC desks, and market makers each connected to local banks in their jurisdictions and to the same global rail: blockchains. Which means you can now send money from a bank in one country, through one of these venues, across a blockchain, through another venue, and into a bank in another country with stablecoins as the medium. A new cross-border payment network, assembled piece by piece without anyone designing it top-down. A new category of company, Payment Orchestrators, emerged to coordinate it.
If that sounds a lot like the payment networks described above, that's because it is one.
Why Lead
Lead serves customers at the cutting edge of financial technology, and our infrastructure has to match. For the last three years, Lead has been the US "last mile" connector letting exchanges, orchestrators, fintechs, and crypto-native companies move money between blockchain networks and fiat. We've also reimagined existing products: we issue cards backed not by fiat balances but by stablecoin balances held outside the bank. And we were among the first to settle with card networks over blockchain rails, enabling clients to stay in stablecoins end-to-end and settle daily.
When you stop thinking of Lead as a traditional bank and start thinking of it as financial infrastructure and when you stop thinking of blockchains as crypto and start thinking of them as payment rails, the acquisition makes sense. That framing is also why this is such an interesting moment to be building here.
In the posts that follow, we'll go deeper: how stablecoins actually work, why money movement is so hard to get right, and what the stablecoin-native future of payments looks like in practice. We're glad you're along for it.
