Have you ever wondered why banks take 5% or even 10% in fees when transferring money to family abroad?

This is not a technical cost, but rather the blatant margin that intermediaries take. Especially for workers in developing countries, their hard-earned money gets sliced away just by transaction fees. This kind of practice has continued for decades, essentially allowing centralized institutions to collect tolls while doing nothing.

Why is this happening? Because traditional cross-border transfers go through several layers of bank intermediaries, each taking a cut. It is common for money to take three to five days to arrive, and the fees are exorbitantly high.

Web3 was supposed to solve this issue. But what is the reality? The gas fees for many L1 and L2 networks are still high, and cross-chain bridges still charge a fee. For ordinary people transferring a few dozen dollars, the costs simply can't come down.

However, some new public chains are trying different paths recently. For example, by using a unified settlement layer, they compress multiple intermediaries into a single step. Coupled with account abstraction technology, they directly use stablecoins to pay transaction fees, reducing costs to nearly zero and shortening settlement time to just a few seconds.

The core of this design concept is:
Bypass the traditional banking system and allow funds to flow directly on the blockchain. Small remittances can also avoid worrying about fees eating into profits. While improving efficiency, it truly lowers the threshold for financial services.

The cross-border payment market is large enough; whoever can optimize costs and experience to the extreme will reap the benefits.