Written by: Lawyer Liu Honglin

There is a somewhat different perspective on the understanding of blockchain.

Here, we have been envisioning blockchain as the infrastructure of the next-generation internet, discussing that blockchain is a technology or application that changes production relations. But I think this might be too grand.

From a temporal perspective, the implementation of this thing could take decades or even hundreds of years; each generation has its challenges, and we cannot always focus on things that concern our grandchildren.

So, at this moment, blockchain technology has only been born for a little over a decade—counting from the publication of the white paper, it has been just the time span from 2008 to now. While we are questioning, doubting, and worrying about the application value of blockchain, I personally feel that such worries are of little significance.

The reason is that, during our generation's entire time cycle, the application value and popularization speed of blockchain are unlikely to be as fast as we imagine. Just like when the internet or computers first emerged, the first generation of entrepreneurs and internet professionals found it hard to imagine that today we could use the internet to hail a taxi, watch videos, or make instant payments.

At that time, everyone just thought that the internet was a cutting-edge technology capable of sending and receiving information, browsing news, and reading e-books.

Therefore, it is not about doubting the real value of blockchain, but from a historical and temporal perspective, the application of blockchain in ordinary households, or its realization of large-scale application, still has a long way to go.

The anxiety many people feel about blockchain today is essentially compressing the technology evolution of a decade, or even longer, into a three to five-year expectation, which will inherently create cognitive dissonance and anxiety.

However, the application of blockchain technology is currently indeed focusing on the right areas.

Some characteristics of blockchain technology, such as anti-tampering, decentralized bookkeeping, traceability, and its inherently financial attributes, I believe will possibly be limited to the fintech sector in the next ten or even twenty years.

For instance, in currency payments, whether it is stablecoin payments or large-value transfer tools represented by Bitcoin; and also importantly, the blockchainization of traditional financial markets or financial transactions, including the on-chain of assets such as securities, funds, and bonds.

Especially one recent experience I had makes me even more convinced that the value of blockchain compared to traditional centralized solutions could truly be over tenfold, even a hundredfold creations and enhancements.

Previously, Lawyer Honglin also worked on internet products for several years and led product research teams, and can be seen as a mobile internet entrepreneur. The experience of creating products and starting businesses gives me an intuitive judgment: if a technology or application does not achieve a tenfold improvement compared to traditional methods, it is not a breakthrough or disruptive innovation.

In the past year, I experienced two things that led me to believe that blockchain in the financial sector, especially in its integration with traditional finance, could genuinely provide improvements over tenfold or even a hundredfold.

The first thing: The efficiency gap in cross-border payments

The first thing is my previous experience of transferring money from a mainland bank card to overseas.

On one hand, the amount is indeed limited, as there are foreign exchange management systems. On the other hand, I had to go to an offline bank counter to submit personal materials to make the remittance. Thirdly, the total remittance fees can reach hundreds of RMB, and both the time cost and monetary cost are very high.

This is still limited to mainland China and Hong Kong. If remitting to South America or other small countries, the cycle and cost would be even higher. Behind this, there are actually traditional cross-border payment systems, such as the SWIFT network and multi-tiered agent mechanisms that add to the time and expenses with each layer of organization.

Now, if we look at the internet blockchain encryption payments of 2026, for instance, using USDT or other stablecoins, the fees are basically 0.01 USD, at most 0.1 USD, and the receipt speed takes just a few seconds up to a minute.

Therefore, conducting cross-border fund transfers within a legal and compliant framework, compared to traditional methods, has a tenfold to a hundredfold increase in efficiency. This improvement is not theoretical, but something any real user can directly feel.

Thus, the reason I view and support crypto payments as the future, and that we continue to have lawyers like Shao Jiadian who represent Mankun Law Office delving into global crypto payment legal compliance and continuously offering legal compliance education to the payment industry, is because we, as users, genuinely perceive its commercial value.

Our choice at Mankun to deeply engage in the blockchain industry is based on the recognition of this commercial and social value, not based on a grand technological narrative.

The second thing: The slowness of securities trading settlement

The second experience happened just last night. Recently, the Nasdaq Index (QQQ) surged greatly, and I remembered that I had bought some Nasdaq stocks on a friend's suggestion and kept them in my securities account.

As a result, when I opened my account to sell on Saturday, the system showed I had to wait until next Wednesday, meaning a gap of 5 days, to know how much this transaction sold for. With the May Day holiday coinciding, I will not be able to withdraw this money from the account until May 8 at the earliest.

This means that from trading to fund recovery, the entire process takes almost over ten days, which feels very exaggerated to me. For a user who is already used to the instant feedback of the internet, such delays are very counterintuitive.

We also know that from 2025 onwards, a clear breakout direction is the so-called "on-chain US stocks", or a broader perspective of RWA (Real World Assets on-chain). It is available for instant trading 7×24 hours and theoretically can achieve on-chain settlement and asset simultaneous delivery. Not to discuss the price difference issues since this is merely about user scale and liquidity.

From this comparative angle, you would firmly believe that the tokenization of US stocks, or globally financial assets in the blockchain world, is an inevitable trend.

All the current concerns regarding anti-money laundering, KYC issues, and regulatory questions are indeed not fully solved yet. However, from our compliance business perspective, these problems can be resolved; they are merely issues of technology, compliance frameworks, and institutional confirmation.

Just like in earlier years, everyone was skeptical about various issues, but now an increasing number of sovereign countries have recognized it as an alternative asset; while stablecoins, especially compliant ones like USDC, are gradually being understood as payment methods that can be regulated and included in systems.

Therefore, the compliance regulation, work requirements, and guidelines regarding on-chain US stocks will also gradually mature; we can actually leave this issue to time.

But what I want to express is that from the user experience and social value creation perspective, this again represents a tenfold or hundredfold speed of innovation, similar to crypto payments.

Blockchain: The elephant in the room

From this perspective, the value of blockchain is indeed immense.

Because we must understand that traditional financial institutions, whether in payment or securities, are limited in efficiency due to the presence of numerous intermediaries, centralized service organizations, and the need to repeatedly audit, reconcile, and confirm data transaction processes through technology and manpower.

Blockchain is called the "internet of value," and its technical characteristics allow value circulation, rights confirmation, and fund settlement to be completed within a unified ledger system, thereby significantly reducing intermediaries, increasing efficiency and transparency.

Therefore, from this perspective, regardless of whether blockchain is the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet, at least in the current social state of the internet, blockchain has practical applications and needs with social value in fintech.

The commercial value and social efficiency created by this combination is an increase of over ten times.

Conversely, the application of this technology should inherently have no national boundaries. For US stocks, China's A-shares, or Hong Kong stocks, whoever can truly embrace blockchain quickly and rapidly put traditional financial securities on-chain, significantly enhancing transaction and clearing efficiency, achieving future 7×24 hour, and even higher frequency trading capabilities, is actually a highly certain trend for the future.

In the current relatively inefficient traditional financial system, blockchain is no longer a "storytelling concept," but a tool that is genuinely creating efficiency and changing user experience.

We may not care whether blockchain can become the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet, but it is evident that at this stage, in the financial sector, it has become a visibly substantial and continuously magnifying elephant in the room.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。