In an exclusive interview with CCN, Ryne Saxe, CEO of Eco, discussed how stablecoins are reshaping the flow of money on a global scale.
Saxe explained why the rise of blockchain-based dollars has reached a turning point, how traditional finance helped drive their legitimacy, and why interoperability across blockchains remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
He also reflected on the deeper meaning of this technological shift, describing stablecoins as the foundation of a new digital economy powered by transparency, liquidity, and borderless movement of value.
For Saxe, the future of digital finance is not just technical, it’s philosophical. And his boldest statement is:
“Money is a choice.”
See the full interview here:
How Stablecoins Evolved Into the Core of Digital Liquidity
Saxe says the turning point for stablecoins came “pretty clearly over the last 12 to 18 months,” when traditional finance began to endorse blockchain-based dollars as legitimate digital instruments.
“Initially, it was like an organized lobby by payment companies, financial institutions, increasingly important crypto companies,” he explains.
“They started to advocate not only for regulatory tolerance, but regulatory endorsement of this technology as literally just a better dollar.”
He adds that adoption accelerated when major firms such as Stripe and Visa began building around stablecoin infrastructure.
“It’s just a dollar that moves more freely, devoid of banks and borders,” he says. “And there’s huge demand for that.”
Why Blockchain Interoperability Still Holds Back Stablecoins
Despite strong growth, liquidity fragmentation across blockchains continues to slow stablecoin scalability. “We have really good interoperability tech that’s come along quite a bit over the last couple of years,” Saxe says.
“But new chains, new stablecoins, new protocols are spreading faster than the interoperability tech connected to it.”
He explains that the issue is not conceptual but structural:
“As this market explodes, the extensibility of current interoperability tech to pass data and move liquidity across all of those in-demand routes is lagging. That’s okay. We just need to grow up and scale into this use case.”
Creating Incentives to Unite Liquidity Across Blockchains
Saxe believes the missing piece is a shared incentive layer among major blockchain networks and stablecoin issuers.
Drawing an analogy to Visa’s early history, he says, Visa got a hundred banks, who were otherwise competitors, to subscribe to the same payment network.
He envisions a similar mechanism for blockchains and decentralized finance protocols:
“What’s missing is effectively an incentivized liquidity layer that they all subscribe to in trust that if they’re easing money movement kind of across that network, they’re growing the pie for everybody involved by improving user experience and user trust.”
Eco’s Full-Stack Approach to Stablecoin Transfers
Asked how Eco stands out, Saxe highlights two factors: positioning and performance.
“We are full-stack, opinionated for the stablecoin use case,” he explains.
“Most people that we are maybe competitive against, it’s usually kind of like an adjacency right now, are generalized protocols or generalized platforms, whereas we only care about moving stablecoins, which today is just moving digital dollars.”
He adds that Eco’s system is optimized “from the user tap all the way down to the liquidity orders on the protocol,” allowing transfers “at size across blockchains in one tap in two seconds.”
The Meaning of a Stablecoin Economy
Saxe describes the stablecoin economy as the foundation of today’s tokenized financial system. “A stablecoin is the numeraire or the common denominator between the various tokenized use cases,” he says.
“It’s the only asset that’s going to get you anywhere on chain.”
He predicts that on-chain dollar movement will one day “dwarf the U.S. economy” because it is “unbounded by banks or borders.”
Stablecoins, he adds, form “the critical infrastructure of the plumbing to the tokenized use cases that are going to develop down the road.”
Preventing Centralization in a Stablecoin World
When asked how to prevent a few issuers or liquidity hubs from concentrating power, Saxe compares the future landscape to the long-running dynamic between centralized and decentralized exchanges (DEX).
“You can imagine a closed-loop provider, a SaaS business building API, or a more decentralized alternative, a protocol aggregating liquidity in a permissionless and transparent way,” he says.
“I would give the advantage to the open protocol because it can distribute and grow much more quickly.”
For stablecoins to scale globally, he insists, “it calls for a protocol, not a company.”
The race to aggregate liquidity, Saxe admits, it feels a little bit zero-sum right now. He sees an emerging “standards war” among issuers and protocols but believes collaboration will eventually win.
The Philosophical Trade-Offs of Liquidity Design
Reflecting on the hardest trade-offs in building a universal liquidity layer, Saxe calls them “philosophical.”
He explains that you could choose to build an API layer as a SaaS business, or you could build an open protocol that incentivizes idle liquidity to supply capacity and ensure performance. The difference, he says, lies in values.
“It’s about where value should flow”, toward a singular company or a network of participants.
That decision, he adds, is “a values-driven philosophical trade-off” tied directly to how freely money should move on-chain.
Money as a Choice: The Global Impact Ahead
Looking at the next five years, Saxe sees both promise and tension in the spread of digital dollars.
“Right now, 99 % of stablecoin demand is demand for digital U.S. dollars,” he notes. “If it scales too quickly, smaller economies might find 50 % of their currency flow in dollars, not local currency.”
He predicts that this could lead to new “capital controls versus stablecoins,” forcing governments to decide how much on-chain money they can tolerate.
Still, Saxe remains optimistic. “Crypto is going to demonstrate to billions of people that money is a choice,” he says.
“If enough people make the same choices about what money should be, then a new meme for money is created, and money evolves in that way. That’s either incredibly equalizing and like optimistic for the world, or it’s very destabilizing past a certain point.”
Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as, financial advice. We do not make any warranties regarding the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of this information. All investments involve risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. We recommend consulting a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
Dr. Lorena Nessi is an award-winning journalist and media technology expert with 15 years of experience in digital culture and communication. Based in Oxfordshire, UK, she combines academic insight with hands-on media practice.
She holds a PhD in Communication, Sociology, and Digital Cultures, and an MA in Globalization, Identity, and Technology.
Lorena has taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Oxford. She is a former producer for the BBC in London, with additional experience creating television content in Mexico and Japan.
Her research focuses on digital cultures, social media, technology, capitalism, and the societal impact of blockchain innovation.
She has written extensively on digital media and emerging technologies, with her work featured in both academic and media platforms. Her Web3 expertise explores how blockchain technologies shape culture, economics, and decentralized systems.
Outside of work, Lorena enjoys reading science fiction, playing strategic board games, traveling, and chasing adventures that get her heart racing. A perfect day ends with a relaxing spa and a good family meal.
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