There’s something I’ve always found rather counterintuitive.. Everyone talks about stablecoins—always about whether their peg is solid, how big the market is, whose wallet got frozen again.. But in the past couple of days, there’s a piece of news asking a completely different question: can they be used to send life-saving money.
⚖️ 消息第一时间
A U.S.-listed stablecoin issuer, through its own foundation, has announced two rounds of grants—to the United Nations Development Programme and the World Food Programme.. What they want to test sounds simple, but it’s hard to do: using digital payments, including regulated payment-type stablecoins, to get aid money into people’s hands faster and more cheaply.
Most people’s first reaction is, “It’s just another stablecoin trying to sell a financial-inclusion story.”.. But what’s really worth watching isn’t that.
First, see what these two batches of money are actually going toward. The UNDP plans to build a “digital asset innovation pool,” taking payment methods that have already worked within individual projects and moving them into standard programs—tailoring local rules, day-to-day operations, and documentation that protects recipients. It also needs a toolkit to measure three things: how long it takes to arrive, how much it costs, and how many people are covered. The money received by the World Food Programme won’t be tested for payments first—it will go toward laying the foundation: governance and risk-control rules, funds and reconciliation systems, and compliance tools that can work across multiple countries, then running pilots over the next three years in two to three regional corridors.
Even more interesting is the old data it pulled together. In the cash-for-work program for Al A’pba’eh in Syria, distribution costs were cut from 10% to 2%.. In Haiti’s pilot, when the cellular network went down, payments could still continue.
Putting this “number” into the aid “bucket” isn’t a small detail.. Aid funding is on the order of tens of billions of dollars every year. Saving eight percentage points in distribution costs is like magically adding another eight points of aid. That’s what makes this intriguing—the saved money doesn’t come from people donating more, but from switching to a different distribution track.
And that’s when things start to look different.. The demand side for stablecoins is changing. At first it was traders using them, then institutions, and now it’s organizations that “must deliver money to people.” The temperament of this kind of buyer is completely different from the previous two groups: it doesn’t care about returns. It cares whether funds can be delivered, how many days it takes, and the number of cost percentage points.. A customer that doesn’t look at your yield is actually the hardest to get rid of.
But here’s the problem.. In aid scenarios, compliance, reconciliation, and the requirements for acting as a trusted party are the highest among all use cases. It has to pass local licensing, match accounts cleanly, and withstand audits—so it only dares to pilot for three years, in two or three corridors at a time, not roll it out all at once. And the last mile is still the old issue: recipients won’t actually hold a string of stablecoins—they still need someone locally to exchange it into cash or balances in a mobile wallet.. Who does that part and what it costs is what truly determines whether this succeeds or fails.
So what’s really worth keeping an eye on is.. the day an institution writes “paying out using stablecoins” into routine budgets—not just into pilot reports. Only then will this line truly be put into practice. And the same goes the other way: if three years later there are only a few more reports, then all those years of stablecoin’s financial-inclusion story has to be recalculated from scratch.
⚖️ 消息第一时间
A U.S.-listed stablecoin issuer, through its own foundation, has announced two rounds of grants—to the United Nations Development Programme and the World Food Programme.. What they want to test sounds simple, but it’s hard to do: using digital payments, including regulated payment-type stablecoins, to get aid money into people’s hands faster and more cheaply.
Most people’s first reaction is, “It’s just another stablecoin trying to sell a financial-inclusion story.”.. But what’s really worth watching isn’t that.
First, see what these two batches of money are actually going toward. The UNDP plans to build a “digital asset innovation pool,” taking payment methods that have already worked within individual projects and moving them into standard programs—tailoring local rules, day-to-day operations, and documentation that protects recipients. It also needs a toolkit to measure three things: how long it takes to arrive, how much it costs, and how many people are covered. The money received by the World Food Programme won’t be tested for payments first—it will go toward laying the foundation: governance and risk-control rules, funds and reconciliation systems, and compliance tools that can work across multiple countries, then running pilots over the next three years in two to three regional corridors.
Even more interesting is the old data it pulled together. In the cash-for-work program for Al A’pba’eh in Syria, distribution costs were cut from 10% to 2%.. In Haiti’s pilot, when the cellular network went down, payments could still continue.
Putting this “number” into the aid “bucket” isn’t a small detail.. Aid funding is on the order of tens of billions of dollars every year. Saving eight percentage points in distribution costs is like magically adding another eight points of aid. That’s what makes this intriguing—the saved money doesn’t come from people donating more, but from switching to a different distribution track.
And that’s when things start to look different.. The demand side for stablecoins is changing. At first it was traders using them, then institutions, and now it’s organizations that “must deliver money to people.” The temperament of this kind of buyer is completely different from the previous two groups: it doesn’t care about returns. It cares whether funds can be delivered, how many days it takes, and the number of cost percentage points.. A customer that doesn’t look at your yield is actually the hardest to get rid of.
But here’s the problem.. In aid scenarios, compliance, reconciliation, and the requirements for acting as a trusted party are the highest among all use cases. It has to pass local licensing, match accounts cleanly, and withstand audits—so it only dares to pilot for three years, in two or three corridors at a time, not roll it out all at once. And the last mile is still the old issue: recipients won’t actually hold a string of stablecoins—they still need someone locally to exchange it into cash or balances in a mobile wallet.. Who does that part and what it costs is what truly determines whether this succeeds or fails.
So what’s really worth keeping an eye on is.. the day an institution writes “paying out using stablecoins” into routine budgets—not just into pilot reports. Only then will this line truly be put into practice. And the same goes the other way: if three years later there are only a few more reports, then all those years of stablecoin’s financial-inclusion story has to be recalculated from scratch.
