Selling shovels

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Money is the last thing technology forgot to upgrade. We rebuilt how we shop, date, hail taxis, and argue with strangers, yet sending $200 across a border still involves a three-to-five-day relay race between correspondent banks, each taking a cut and a coffee break. Enter Stablecoins!

Stablecoins are the long-overdue patch, or ‘The internet's upgrade to money’, and the patch is finally installing.

The numbers have stopped being speculative. Stablecoins processed roughly $28 trillion in real economic volume in 2025, and Chainalysis projects adjusted volume could reach $719 trillion by 2035 on organic growth alone - closer to $1.5 quadrillion once you factor in the great wealth transfer to crypto-native millennials and point-of-sale saturation.

Activant Research, in its Q1 2026 note, frames the prize plainly: cross-border payments is a $179 trillion market that still settles like it’s 1985, with fees ranging from 5 basis points to over 1,000. Citi's bull case has stablecoins hitting $4 trillion by 2030. This is no longer a question of if. It's a question of who.

Enter Noah

Which brings me to Shah Ramezani and Noah, a business we’ve been watching closely. Shah grew up in Zurich, the Swiss banking hub, early on in his career exploring a career in finance, before deciding that traditional finance moved with the urgency of a glacier. He decamped to London, joined e-commerce rocket ship The Hut Group, and left just before its IPO. His conviction crystallised after the FTX blow-up, when stablecoins were the one corner of crypto that didn't catch fire - because, unlike the rest, they were actually fulfilling a real demand.

Noah’s origin story is instructive. It began life as a Revolut-style neobank on crypto rails - right idea, wrong timing. The pivot came from a counter-intuitive realisation: getting licensed in Europe, one of the most punishing regulatory environments on earth, was not a cost. It was the moat. Noah repositioned as infrastructure, selling compliance and payment rails to businesses rather than chasing consumers. The traction suggests the bet is landing. Noah has closed double-digit $m in ARR contracts, and operating rails across 160+ countries, with local off-ramps in 70+ countries.

Focus as a Weapon

The stablecoin map is gloriously crowded. Activant’s thesis map looks like a periodic table designed by someone having a nervous breakdown - issuers, orchestrators, on/off-ramps, custodians, POS players, and a small nation of B2B applications. Everyone is shouting. Differentiation is hard.

Noah’s answer is heretically simple: do one thing. Cross-border FX payments only. No card issuance, no stablecoin issuance. As Shah puts it, incumbents will never fully commit to stablecoin payments because for them it's a hedge - a side bet to be quietly unwound if the weather turns. Noah points its entire balance sheet and every waking engineer at the problem. That, he argues, is an insurmountable advantage in product quality, and it's how a fourth or fifth mover wins customers against players who sprawled too broadly too fast.

Activant’s central thesis is a "value chain flip": as Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks commoditise - no enterprise customer asks which chain moved their money - value migrates upward to the orchestration and compliance layers. Trusted compliance, in their words, "unlocks institutional adoption." Noah has been quietly building exactly that asset.

The Compliance Moat Is the Real Moat

Here's where it gets interesting, and where Ripple's own European fintech checklist accidentally makes Noah's case. Ripple argues - correctly - that building compliant stablecoin payments in Europe means navigating licensing frameworks, custody providers, liquidity partners and local payout relationships across fragmented jurisdictions, and that most providers simply can't. Ripple's pitch is "buy ours." Noah's is “we built ours the hard way, and the hard way is the point.”

As mentioned, Noah now operates across 160+ countries through a combination of local rails and five sponsor banks in major markets (two in Europe, three in the US). Each new banking relationship makes the next easier, because Noah can show up with a strong and comprehensive compliance track record rather than a pitch deck and a prayer. Add KYC data across hundreds of thousands of users in markets like Kenya and Nigeria, plus AI agents trained on Noah’s own APIs and edge cases, and you have IP that compounds with time. Reputation, it turns out, is the one moat you cannot fundraise your way around.

Incumbents: Partners, Not Prey

The pleasing surprise in Shah’s world view is that the likes of Citi, Western Union and PayPal aren't the enemy, they are the customers-in-waiting. His framing: when an incumbent calls a corridor "high risk," it rarely means the market is unserviceable. It means "we don't want to do the work." The monitoring, the compliance, the unglamorous plumbing in Lagos and Bogotá - a majority of the incumbents have decided it isn't worth their while. They would happily rent Noah's rails. As they simply lack the speed and tooling to build them.

That’s consistent with what the incumbents are signalling publicly. Visa has processed billions in stablecoin settlement; Mastercard bought BVNK; Stripe acquired Bridge. The giants want exposure. Few want to do the dirty work themselves.

The European Question

Can European players win a market the US is busy nationalising? The US has the tailwind, the GENIUS Act has turned regulation into a demand engine, with institutional entry begetting more institutional entry, and Washington has quietly noticed that emerging-market appetite for dollar stablecoins is appetite for US Treasuries. Europe, by Shah's reckoning, has used regulation to dampen digital assets rather than enable them, while the UK once again dithers over which way to jump.

But, and this is the bull case - that very harshness has forged operators who can go anywhere. London remains a deliberate hiring edge: a deep bench of payments talent from Revolut, Wise and Monzo looking for the next thing, with far less competition for them than in a US market being strip-mined by Stripe and the AI labs.

Still only at Base Camp

We are, to be clear, currently at base camp when it comes to stablecoins. Even the optimists concede stablecoins won’t fully replace legacy rails; they will become a dominant alternative within a multi-rail world. However, a modest slice of $1.5 quadrillion in annual flows is a serious business, and the winners will be the focused operators who treat compliance as a product, not a tax.

My money is on the builders doing the unglamorous work in the hard corridors. Noah is building an ark for the two-to-three billion people facing 20-30% annual inflation who would quite like to hold dollars. The flood is coming either way. Best to own the boat.