Cameron Conrad

The stage is set. 🦅🇺🇸 The energy in the room at Mar-a-Lago is absolutely electric. World Liberty Forum 2026 is officially kicking off!

This is correct: consumer stablecoin merchant acceptance in the west is a complete non-starter imo. You can't build a new payment network without exclusivity or a compelling forcing function (rewards, credit), the inertia of status quo is too strong. And the current card-based system for point of sale isn't actually broken for most merchants and consumers in developed markets. Every successful payment network in our lifetime launched with some form of exclusivity or a killer reward: Crypto: Served the genuinely unbanked, people in hyperinflationary economies, and grey/black markets where traditional rails were unavailable or unworkable PayPal: Was initially the only practical way to transact peer-to-peer online and became the default payment method for eBay, which created a massive captive marketplace... they also started by giving out free money Discover Card: Launched with exclusive acceptance at Sears (then the world's largest retailer) and offered electronic payment when that was still novel - essentially a closed loop that bootstrapped network effects WeChat/AliPay: Credit cards weren't common in China, this was the only way for most people to interact with social media/digital services Starbucks: The one case where it isn't exclusive (you can still pay with card) but they've done a good job giving out killer rewards to frequent users (more stars) Fortnite/Roblox: You get the idea Stablecoin checkout has: No captive audience, no exclusive inventory, and no problem it solves better than cards for the average consumer or merchant. You're asking both sides to adopt new infra/workflows... for what marginal benefit? People always talk about fees but there's too much friction for that to matter, and consumers like their credit card rewards. The one exception might be AI agents: Cards currently require human identity, credit checks, and personal liability - AI agents don't fit that framework. They might make thousands of micro-transactions daily where card fees don't make sense. Machine-to-machine commerce could need programmable, instant settlement without human-in-the-loop friction. But even here, if the AI is just acting on behalf of a human/company, you can put a card on file. And critically - are there AI-native marketplaces that only accept stablecoins? Without exclusive AI-specific commerce at scale, you're back to the same bootstrap problem. Certainly AI's aren't going to be buying stuff at the in-person merchant networks being built. To Nikil's point - the real opportunity is cards backed by stablecoins. This makes sense because it doesn't require rebuilding acceptance infrastructure, just like Apple Pay is a nice front-end but uses existing infra.