Last week witnessed an interesting contrasting scene.

A certain electronics factory in Shenzhen paid a supplier in Vietnam 5000 dollars, using the Plasma blockchain stablecoin channel. What is the transaction fee? Three cents. What is the arrival time? Three seconds.

Almost at the same time, analysts William Marshall and Bill Zu from Goldman Sachs released a report stating that the U.S. Treasury will aggressively issue short-term debt over the next two years. The scale of treasury bonds with maturities of two to seven years will significantly increase, while those with maturities of ten years or more will remain unchanged. This operation will continue until November 2026, directly pulling down the average maturity of treasury bonds.

In simple terms, it's about borrowing short-term money. When the interest rates are this high, short-term debt can indeed result in paying less interest, but the problem is that you have to borrow new to pay off old debts more frequently. Once interest rates fluctuate again, the whole situation becomes more fragile.

Interestingly, the Federal Reserve is expected to take on about half of the newly issued short-term debt. While it is shouting about reducing its balance sheet, it still has to continue buying bonds, and the cost of operating this machine is becoming increasingly burdensome.

Looking at the data on the blockchain side: the Plasma chain can handle over 1.2 million stablecoin transactions daily, with transaction fees typically at a few cents level, and settlements occur in seconds. There are no intermediaries, no complex clearing systems, and certainly none of those invisible operating costs.

One is the increasingly dependent traditional system on short-term financing with high costs; the other is the new infrastructure with costs approaching zero and maximum efficiency. These two parallel lines are racing on their respective tracks.

The finance department of that electronics factory in Shenzhen may not care at all about the debt maturity structure; they only know that this cross-border transfer saved them a few hundred yuan in fees and that they don't have to wait two or three days for the funds to arrive. Such cases happen quietly every day all over the world.

What will the future of finance look like? Perhaps there is no need to predict; we just need to see which system can solve real problems with lower costs and faster speeds. The numbers are clear.