Seven years to meet this moment

Every year on my work anniversary (May 1st), I write a blog post in celebration. This year is no different, but somehow it just feels different.

Seven years ago, everyone in this space told me the same thing: we're going to disrupt the financial system, make it obsolete. That was the pitch. That was the energy.

I knew from the beginning that wasn't the company I was here to build.

I wanted to interoperate. I wanted to improve. I wanted traditional finance to be part of the journey, not on the other end of the wrecking ball. I wanted to see the early web principles built in at every possible layer. The version of disruption that I saw was done in coordination with the institutions, the systems that already move the world's money, and even the regulators. Everyone disrupting themselves for the benefit of the market, the users.

Improve and supplement, don't supplant. That's the line we've used for years. We didn't have a roadmap for the moment we're in now. We had conviction about the kind of network and ecosystem we wanted to build, and that conviction shaped every decision we made.

A lot of people in this space believed regulation would never come. But I never agreed. In fact, I welcomed it. When it comes to moving money, there is always a body that can name the harm. There is always a framework that covers fraud, consumer protection, and market conduct. Although specifics for crypto didn't exist yet, the principles always did.

So we built like the rules would come.

We engaged on the Hill and with global policymakers, even during those times when others were hesitant to. We sat in rooms where the technology was a complete unknown and explained it. We built the network to meet a regulatory framework before it existed.

The architecture reflected the same conviction. Some of those design choices were made before I arrived: built-in compliance tools, proof of trust at the validator level. The conviction behind them is what brought me here. Clawback and asset freezing came later, we built them into the base layer because regulated issuers would need them—the ecosystem anticipated its own needs.

These tools enabled the growth of an anchor network with on- and off-ramps that can comply with regulations, and issuers that can create assets with permissions, allowlists, and role-based authorities because that's how institutions issue assets in the world in which they operate. When smart contracts were added, they were built in Rust, and only after the financial primitives were already proven. Programmability extended the network. It didn't replace what the network was for. None of those choices were obvious at the time. They look obvious now.

Five years ago, MoneyGram came to Stellar to reach the people the financial system reaches last: migrant workers, families separated by borders, anyone trying to move cash in or out without a bank. We built that integration into the network. It runs in 180+ countries today.

When Franklin Templeton was ready to bring a money market fund onchain, the first one ever, they built it on Stellar. We didn't sell them on it, and they didn't need to ask our permission. The network already had the controls a regulated asset manager requires. They chose Stellar.

When UNHCR needed to deliver payments into hard-to-reach places quickly and reliably, they built on the Stellar network.

When the Republic of the Marshall Islands launched the world's first onchain universal basic income program, distributing a digitally-native sovereign bond as payments to citizens across hundreds of remote islands, they built on the Stellar network.

These are operational systems with real consequences. If the rails fail, people don't eat and citizens don't get paid. Sovereign governments and global humanitarian institutions don't choose infrastructure for that kind of work unless they trust it to hold.

Most recently, U.S. Bank, one of the five largest banks in the country, chose Stellar to pilot its own stablecoin. Mike Villano, the SVP running U.S. Bank's digital asset products, was direct about why. The bank needed know-your-customer controls. It needed the ability to unwind transactions and claw back assets. On Stellar, those controls sit at the base operating layer of the network. They aren't bolted on through business logic above it.

None of this happened by accident. By doing the work early on, we made a bet that most of our industry didn't make.

For most of the last decade, the dominant bet in this space was that crypto would replace finance. Build a parallel system. Make the old one obsolete. Disrupt.

That bet didn't pan out. The parallel system never replaced anything. Volumes grew, but the institutions held. So did the rails. So did the customers.

Plenty of bets in this industry didn't pay. Ours did. The bet we made was that traditional finance had to be part of this, not the target of it.

The bet has flipped. Institutions are coming onchain. So are the assets. The networks that win this cycle are the ones built like financial infrastructure from day one, with the controls, the compliance, and the settlement guarantees institutions require.

No doubt, other organizations will continue to make that point.

Institutions coming onchain was the bet. And the work continues. The part I'm most excited about is still ahead.

Distribution is what comes next. Most institutions coming onchain today are running two systems, in parallel. Onchain assets sit in one place, offchain assets in another, with two ledgers and two operating models to reconcile. That's a fine place to start, but it isn't where the work ends.

The deeper an institution moves onchain, the more it gets back: faster rebalancing on assets it already issues, compliance built into the system rather than reconciled after the fact, settlement that runs around the clock on instruments that today stop at 4 p.m., a single consolidated view of a customer's holdings instead of fifteen apps with fifteen logins. The 80-year-old who's never going to download a crypto wallet is exactly the person these assets need to reach. They should encounter them on the website they already use, in the brokerage they already trust. The opportunity isn't bringing people to crypto. It's bringing the infrastructure to them.

Privacy is the layer adoption requires next. Institutions don't need anonymity. They need confidentiality of counterparty, position, and intent: opaque to outsiders, visible to compliance, auditable to regulators. Configurable when they need it, not on by default. The crypto-native privacy stack wasn't built for that. The institutional version doesn't exist at scale yet. Building it is what unlocks the work institutions do at scale: large block trades, OTC settlement, treasury operations that don't yet have a way to run on a public ledger as it stands.

These are the problems I want the Stellar ecosystem to solve next. They're hard, and that's the point. This moment only matters if we do the work that comes after.

Seven years to meet this moment. A lot of moments still to build for.